A friend recently brought an online video to my attention. It was a video review of M. Night Shyamalan’s most recent film The Visit, currently in theaters, and enjoying moderate critical and financial success. The critic who made the video is a man named Bob Chipman, better known by his online persona MovieBob. In his video, Chipman, as is his style, ripped merrily through The Visit with a fervent ferocity, claiming it to be one of the worst films of the year (I would argue that Chipman has, perhaps, not seen too many films this year if a pleasant, low-budget thriller like The Visit attracts his rancor so). Chipman rabidly chatters, on 45, for nearly eight minutes, detailing how badly he was wronged by The Visit, claiming that it didn’t possess the correct filmmaking 101 techniques to be even remotely effective. He targeted Shyamalan in particular as being the primary source of so much of his misery, and the genre – found footage – to be the secondary source.
Chipman’s review of The Visit is also, on a fundamental level, not really a review. The comedic fast-talking, paired with the mock outrage (I assume that it’s mock outrage) peg the video as a stand-up comedy bit. Chipman is not attempting to shed any light on The Visit, and doesn’t seem interested in offering any sort of legitimate, objective analysis. His goal, first and foremost, is to elicit laughs from his own artificially inflated misery.
Chipman is, of course, not the first to do this. Indeed, he is merely yet another drop in the bucket of an unfortunate internet phenomenon known as the Cranky Critic.
Bob Chipman
A Cranky Critic is not merely a film critic who writes negative reviews, or even someone who stands contrary to popular opinion. A Cranky Critic is, functionally, a comedian who uses the written or spoken review (most often for films or video games) as their medium. As we all know, it can be refreshing and hilarious to see an otherwise composed reviewer lose their cool over a bad movie, and The Cranky Critic makes a living of this. They rip apart anything in their path with sardonic wit, and a blithe dismissal of the importance of film. It’s especially popular to pan movies that are already hated in the eyes of the internet-dwelling public. This is why Doug Walker has managed to become so rich. Or why the Mr. Plinkett (the pseudonym of Mike Stoklasa from Red Letter Media) review of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace became so popular a few years back.
Some of these Cranky Critics can be hilarious, and many of them are actually insightful and analytical in their reviews; they hide academic dissection under the guise of comedy. Walker, for instance, has been honing his critical skills as the years have passed, and Stoklasa clearly knows a lot about the actual theory and construction of film. But the bulk of Cranky Critics are merely picking on the lowest hanging fruit, stoking the fires of pop hatred. They are not out to dissect, analyze, challenge, or offer any sort of objective view. They only want to rant, encouraging the wolfpack to hate something they already hated (or, in some rare instances, love what they already loved).
Channel Awesome
To be fair, I have enjoyed the writings of Cranky Critics, going all the way back to the 1990s, starting with the website MrCranky.com. Mr. Cranky, actually the critics Jason Katzman and Hans Bjordahl, was an angry little cuss who graded all movies on a scale of bombs, and every single new film to come from the Hollywood machine was to be savaged and dismissed. I enjoyed it because I knew that Mr. Cranky was meant to be a satire of the academic nature of old world film critics. Certain experienced film critics (including, from time to time, yours truly) have an occasional tendency to dislike movies that are widely adored by the public at large. In their reviews, they (we?) come across as mean-spirited, as if they/we intend to personally and deliberately insult a vast swath of the reading public. Mr. Cranky just took that element of film criticism, and brought it to a satirical extreme.
At the time, Mr. Cranky seemed novel, and any serious critic with a sense of humor about themselves could chuckle heartily with Mr. Cranky. Yes, we critics can be cranky, can’t we?
But Mr. Cranky’s legacy lives on in a hurtful way that is damaging to the very notion of film criticism.
Chris Bores
I take film criticism seriously. Like most professional film critics, I have developed a certain critical philosophy that allows them to remain objective and open to all movies. I may be dreading a film, or looking forward to it, but at the start of every single screening, I have to take a deep breath, calm my nerves, and allow the movie tell me what’s going on. As critics, we are not to be swayed by the hype-heavy marketing machines, nor are we to allow bias to interfere. Maybe Star Wars: The Force Awakens will suck, and maybe Adam Sandler will surprise us with a good one. We have to be open to all the possibilities, allowing the filmmakers to dictate. When we encounter something new, we have to process and define a new flavor, and determine whether or not it is a worthwhile addition to the cinematic canon.
And we’re not beyond reconsideration. It’s okay to change your mind after the fact. Films you were indifferent about may become four-star films upon re-inspection, and beloved childhood classics may collapse when the nostalgia goggles are removed.
The Cranky Critic, however, does not abide by these rules. The Cranky Critic is all about bias, about reinforcing popular opinions. They select films that they know their fans already hate, and run them through the hatred ringer, allowing viewers to hate them all the more passionately. Or, worse yet, they apply outrage to an undeserving film, assuring their viewers that a decent film is worthy of scorn and hate. Either way, they are the ones dripping the blood in the water to attract the sharks.
Red Letter Media
The comedic elements become lost after a while, you see. A skilled Cranky Critic will be smart about leavening their mock outrage with some actual intelligent analysis. But the bulk of Cranky Critics rely heavily on the screaming and fist-pounding. The viewers, then, assume that the outrage is 100% sincere. No actual thought. No explanation of why something is bad. Just 100 funny ways of saying “this is awful.” They talk about injuries they would like to impose upon themselves (the testicles get a workout in this particular form of insult), how angry they are, how much they vomit. Bob Chipman has some points to make, I suppose, but it certainly doesn’t seem as though he did walked into The Visit with any expectation other than hatred, and perhaps fodder for a new internet video.
This sort of insult criticism is eroding criticism. It discourages analysis, and feeds into popular opinion. We currently live in an unfortunate age – as many critics have observed – where dissent from popular opinion is tantamount to criminality; just read the comment section of the review of any superhero movie to get a taste of what I mean. On second thought, don’t ever read the comment sections of anything. It’s now that we need serious criticism more than ever. We need intelligent, objective people on the front lines, sifting through the chaff, looking for actual wheat. We need guides through a saturated age. We don’t need insult comics muddying the waters with their non-critical criticism. We don’t need snarky fratboys to validate your bias.
If you are a Cranky Critic, by all means continue. Especially Doug Walker, and Red Letter Media. I love many of you guys. But know that the “critic” part should come first, and not the “cranky.”
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
