Gunday

Throwing in the pinkvilla review roundup, which they will probably add to as other reviews go live: www.pinkvilla.com/entertainmenttags/priyanka-chopra/gunday-movie-review

Sneha May Francis is...I don't want to say "reliable" in that I end up agreeing with her all the time, but someone who in my experience tends to have coherent opinions and express them articulately. Mohar Basu writes well and tends to sound plausible, but is sufficiently enthusiastic about Ranbir to cut Besharam way more slack than anybody else in the Indian media did, which kind of undermines her authority when she puts down movies like Gunday for juvenile, sexist machismo. (Especially since Ranbir/Ranveer are rapidly developing rival fandoms who fight online constantly). Aside from those two, the pinkvilla roundup's not that helpful in that the people who hate everything, hate this, and the people who like everything/are bribed to like everything like this.

Initial word on box office seems pretty good, as expected given Ranveer's and Priyanka's drawing power and the promos.

60 core in 7 days!

entertainment.oneindia.in/bollywood/box-office/2014/gunday-7-days-first-week-collection-box-office-132537.html

Congrats to the cast and crew! I can't wait to see this romp.

Apparently Gunday has a 1.3 rating on IMDb based on 41 thousand something reviews. I take it those are the users who were angry with the representation of Bangladesh? I just wish more people would vote on other Bollywood movies on IMDb, that way Jai Ho wouldn't be hanging around with a 6.5 rating

I know very little about the history of Bangladesh, but I can understand why so many people were critical about its representation in this film. The writer/director seemed to have integrated the historical/political background into the plot to give his characters an "edge" and to keep up with this new (and yet old) Bollywood trend of exoticizing people who fall outside the North-Indian upper class Hindu male norm. The Bangladeshi backdrop is, in other words, used as a mere plot device.

Other thoughts:

The film used a lot of 70s masala tropes, but didn't own up to them in as confident a manner as I would have liked. IMO, this is partly where the film went wrong. Instead of wholeheartedly embracing the masala tropes, the writer/director tried to ground them in this particular historical and cultural context to make the film more realistic/believable/modern/edgy? Whatever the reason, it was done so sloppily and insensitively that the film suffered for it.

The film was terribly self-indulgent and needed a better editor. The first 15ish minutes follow Bikram and Bala as kids, for example. Those scenes, which were there to show how the two got involved in crime, could have conveyed that point in 5 (rather than 15) minutes.

In terms of performances, none of the actors - except Arjun - are given much to work with. Priyanka had an interesting role, in the sense that she played someone who is allowed to be both glamorous and modest, sexy and chaste. Unfortunately, the script only really hints at these things and, so, she wasn't given a lot of scope to perform. Ranveer had a couple of strong emotional scenes, but Irfan seemed out of place. Arjun was the weakest link by far. He had the most opportunity to show off his acting skills, but he's still stuck in that "furrow my brow + clench my jaw = anger" rut from Ishaqzaade.

^ I can see why the director convinced Ranveer to take the part of Bikram. Bikram does have more layers to his personality; he's allowed to be emotionally vulnerable, for example. (Bala stays very macho and 1D throughout.) That said, I still don't think the script gave enough opportunities to the actors to really showcase their talent. Ranveer did well with what he was given, but he wasn't given very much in the first place.

The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
May 1, 2014
By David Goldenberg

What’s the worst movie in history? “Battlefield Earth,” featuring John Travolta as a dreadlocked alien (IMDb rating: 2.4)? “Troll 2,” a non-sequel featuring no trolls (IMDb score: 2.6)? “Ishtar,” the only movie for rent in Hell’s video store (IMDb score: 4.1)? Perhaps it’s “Gigli” (IMDb score: 2.3), the movie that ruined (the first) Bennifer for all of us?

According to voters on the Internet Movie Database, it’s none of the above. With a dreadful weighted rating of 1.4 out of 10 based on more than 44,000 votes, a 2014 Bollywood movie called “Gunday” is by far the worst movie in the IMDb universe.1 A pretty silly, over-the-top Bollywood action flick about gun couriers that features a love triangle and lots of comical misunderstandings typical to the genre, “Gunday” has somehow found its way to the bottom of the biggest movie database in the world.

That bottom is very far down. There are currently more than 235,000 films on IMDb, and in reporting this piece I found that the average rating of a movie on the site is 6.31, with the middle 50 percent of movies rated between 5.5 and 7.2. Not a single qualified movie besides “Gunday” rates worse than 1.8.

“Gunday,” which came out of the huge Bollywood studio Yash Raj Films in February, isn’t that bad. There are a few large plot holes and unconvincing character motivations, but the dance sequences are top-notch, the costumes are fun, and Irrfan Khan’s portrayal of a world-weary policeman is as good as his fans have come to expect. In India, it’s the top-grossing February movie in Bollywood history. The New York Times’ Rachel Saltz ended her review of “Gunday” by calling it “downright enjoyable.” RogerEbert.com gave it three out of four stars. Variety called it “a boisterous and entertaining period crime drama.”

But the film made a misstep that has doomed it to the bottom of the IMDb pile. “Gunday” offended a huge, sensitive, organized and social-media-savvy group of people who were encouraged to mobilize to protest the movie by giving it the lowest rating possible on IMDb. Of “Gunday’s” ratings, 36,000 came from outside the U.S., and 91 percent of all reviewers gave it one star. The next lowest-rated movie on IMDb — 1.8 stars overall — has a more even distribution of ratings, with only 71 percent of reviewers giving it one star. The evidence suggests the push to down-vote “Gunday” was successful, and that shows just how vulnerable data can be, especially when it’s crowdsourced.

The protest against “Gunday” is the most recent cause célèbre of a Bangladeshi nationalist movement called Gonojagoron Moncho, or National Awakening Stage. Gonojagoron Moncho was founded in response to the trial of Abdul Quader Molla, a Bangladeshi Islamist leader who last year was found guilty of killing hundreds of civilians as part of a paramilitary wing during Bangladesh’s liberation war from Pakistan in 1971. He was sentenced to life in prison for his crimes by the Bangladeshi International Crimes Tribunal. But many Bangladeshis found that sentence too lenient, and more than 100,000 of them gathered in Shahbag Square in the capital city of Dhaka to challenge it.

After months of protests and escalating violence from counter-protestors, Gonojagoron Moncho got its wish. Molla’s political party, Jammat-e-Islami, was banned from participating in future elections, and Molla himself was retried, sentenced to execution and hanged to death late last year.

Flush with success, the movement has since become an online alliance of bloggers focused on protecting Bangladesh’s history and promoting the country’s image. That includes protesting “Gunday,” because of the film’s reference to the Bangladesh Liberation War as the Indo-Pak war. In its first 11 minutes, the movie claims that India alone defeated Pakistan, and implies that an independent Bangladesh was simply a result of the fight.

On Twitter, activists used the hashtag #GundayHumiliatedHistoryOfBangladesh to get the word out about the protests and to ask supporters to bury the film on IMDb. (By using a quarter of their character allotment on the hashtag alone, though, there wasn’t much room for the activists to elaborate.) Facebook groups were formed specifically to encourage irate Bangladeshis and others to down-vote the movie. (A sample call to action: “If you’re a Bangladeshi and care enough to not let some Indian crappy movie distort our history of independence, let’s unite and boycott this movie!!!”)

Fahmidul Haq, an associate professor of mass communication and journalism at the University of Dhaka, said that getting angry at Bollywood for over-representing India’s role in the 1971 war is something that even Gonojagoron Moncho’s opposition can agree on. “Pro-religious, pro-Pakistan and anti-Indian online users are very active in the cyberspace,” he told me. “For the IMDb case, I guess both groups gave lower ranking to ‘Gunday.’”

Bangladesh’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs lodged a formal protest about the film with the Indian government, noting it was drawn to the controversy by the “reaction of people particularly in the social networking sites.” Besieged by complaints, Yash Raj Films was compelled to put out a statement saying, “If this fictitious story and its telling have in any way upset the sentiments of anybody, we would like to clarify that it was totally inadvertent and it is sincerely further regretted.”

Although there have since been numerous complaints about the down-voting of “Gunday,” IMDb doesn’t seem to be discounting the plethora of low ratings, or at least not yet. IMDB’s head of PR, Emily Glassman, told me that while the site has several built-in safeguards to prevent ballot-stuffing, the policy is not to delete or modify individual ratings from registered users.

“Our approach is not to focus on individual titles or incidents, but to analyze this behavior whenever it occurs and to apply any new learnings to strengthen our voting mechanism, so that the resulting improvements affect all titles/votes in our system rather than just the ones specifically affected by these isolated situations,” she said.

What’s left is a movie that’s been sentenced by an angry mob, and is unlikely to shed its apparent punishment any time soon. For Paris Hilton’s “The Hottie & the Nottie” — currently rated second-worst of all time — to take over IMDb’s bottom spot, the next 41,000 voters would have to give it a 1.

Crowdsourcing can be a tremendously powerful way to get a consensus understanding of the world. Because the sample size is so large, there’s an assumption that whatever it yields is robust and true. But even with oversight, aggregated rankings are subject to unforeseen biases. Crowds are always big — but they’re not always wise. Sometimes it’s impossible to control which crowds are being sourced.