Trivia / Bob Chipman

• Author's Saving Throw: In his review of True Grit, he takes back calling Michael Bay a douchebag. He still thinks Bay's a bad director, but that kind of crossed the line.
• Creator Backlash:
  • He considers his digs at Megan Fox to be this, such as saying she's not just a sex symbol, but a bland one at that.
  • Downplayed in regards to his old trilogy of videos detailing the rise and (in his opinion) fall of Kevin Smith. He's said that, given Smith's comeback as a podcaster and TV writer, his initial assessment of Smith as a cautionary tale turned out to be premature.
  • In response to a question about what book would cause one to immediately walk out of a first date if the other person said it was their favorite book, he replied, "Any of mine."
  • After seeing the first trailer for the Princess Diana biopic Spencer, he had this to say about his initial dismissal of Kristen Stewart's acting talent in her Twilight days:
    Whole generation of film writers who were very sure about certain actors and posted their assurances on the internet where they can't be lost, forgotten or aged into context like stupid early work used to be are going to be apologizing to Kristen Stewart forever. I'm one of them.
  • In 2023, he started reuploading old reviews of his from The Escapist that were no longer available on the website, with commentary at the end detailing his thoughts on those films today. Sometimes, his opinion had radically shifted over the years to the point that he wondered what he was thinking in his initial assessment. He's also apologized for using offensive language in some of his older reviews.
    • His review of Public Enemies caused him to ask if he was high when he first wrote it, not just because he now thought the film was "just okay" and unworthy of the effusive praise he originally gave it (especially a line where he called it better than The Untouchables that made him cringe looking back on it), but also because the lengthy section where he gushed about Michael Mann's greatness as a filmmaker sounded like "the worst of Film Twitter before Film Twitter was invented."
      If I wasn't me and I saw this [review] today, I'd make fun of me for it.
    • His review of Drag Me to Hell has Bob chastise himself for using the word "gypsy", since it's a slur against the Romani people, and vowed that he wouldn't do so again. Bob also cut out a joke that made light of teen suicide from the same review, and admitted that most of his jokes that stayed in weren't particularly funny.
    • When he went back to his review of Sherlock Holmes (2009), he was shocked by how much he originally enjoyed the film given that he now regards it as one of the worst Sherlock Holmes adaptations ever made, comparing it unfavorably to the critically reviled 2018 parody Holmes & Watson (his review of which he also included in the video).
    • While his opinion on Scream 4 and the Scream franchise as a whole hasn't changed (he's always found it highly overrated), he does regret writing the opening of his review of Scream 4, which was built around a Framing Device of how he took it personally that the Scream films made movie geekdom into "just another douchebag party trick." He intended the opening as a self-deprecating joke about insufferable movie geeks, but many people thought he was being serious, and it gave him a reputation as exactly that sort of insufferable movie geek.
    • While he otherwise thinks that his reviews of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire were spot-on, he doesn't look back fondly on his joke about Wes Bentley playing "an actor you forgot existed." When he wrote the review, he didn't know about the problems with drug addiction that Bentley faced before he worked on The Hunger Games, which for a time left him destitute and unable to work, and so in hindsight it came across as a low blow against somebody going through real problems.
• Parody Retcon:
  • After eight years of saying he was proud of it, he now claims the infamous Super Mario Bros. 3 Brick By Brick book was intended to be a joke.
  • In his reposting of his Scream 4 review, Bob claims that the opening where he talks about how bitter he is at the franchise because after the first movie, he would be likened to the movie nerd in that film, he insists that it was supposed to be a bit that the audience just didn't get. The problem with that is Bob uses the same tone as that opening in the rest of the review and makes unnecessary jabs at the careers of people involved in the movie.
• Troubled Production:
  • Ironically, his Big Picture episode about the troubled production of The Flash (2023) wound up constantly pushed back and enduring one of its own on account of the fact that said troubled production was happening in real time, between Ezra Miller's constantly mounting personal scandals making them an ever-growing PR nightmare for Warner Bros. and said studio itself going through a massive wave of upheaval. On six separate occasions, he had to completely rewrite the script for the episode thanks to a new salacious headline throwing everything up in the air again. It didn't come out until August 10, 2022, months after he'd planned, and even then, it was less because things had settled down with the film's production and more because it had gotten so out of control that he just wanted to get it out of his system and move on.
  • A comparatively more minor and humorous example came in, funnily enough, the Big Picture episode he did about The Flash after its release, where the audio was wonky because, as he was recording the episode, his neighbor was running a leaf blower.

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