Mayank Shekhar: Now starring: Movie critic ratings

In a Koffee With Karan episode, filmmakers Imtiaz Ali and Kabir Khan look on as Zoya Akhtar talks about rating movie critics

One of the things director Karan Johar and his filmmaker buddies do, when they meet up over coffee on his TV chat-show, is bitch the c''p out of movie critics (I've been on Johar's show twice, in this context).

Last season when Johar, along with other directors, similarly met up, filmmaker Zoya Akhtar made a point about how she should be giving out movie reviews/reviewers star-ratings, in the same way that they condescended towards other people's works, week after week.

It's another matter that a movie review (or commentary of any sort) isn't quite a letter to filmmakers telling them how they are (or what they should be like). It is, at best, a personal, experiential account of what they have done-with their movie, and to the reviewer, as an audience. This is obviously no different from a travelogue-which isn't a letter of complaint/praise to the city's municipal council either. And besides, regardless of anyone's opinion, there is hardly a scope to re-edit a film (or book, or a sporting match), once it's done. What good is a review to a particular creation-unlike in the case of hotels, restaurants, websites, and other public services, that are perennially works in progress.

What Akhtar's remark actually reminded me of is'Nosedive' (Season 3, Episode 1), the most realistic episode of the Netflix masterpiece, Black Mirror, that observes a world falling apart as humans simply start rating each other, through an app, on a whim. How close are we to that dystopia already? If it helps, for instance, I once accidentally looked back at my Ola cab driver's dashboard while I'd got out of the car. He'd rated me two, on his customer-rating app. We'd had a minor tu-tu mein-mein over smoking in his car. I immediately fished out my phone, rated him one! What does it take to extend this phenomenon across every human interaction? Nothing.

Ever since a July, 1928 issue of New York Daily News, where film critic Irene Thirer began rating movies on a scale of three (and the legendary Cashier Du Cinema popularised this idea for crowd-sourced audience-polls in the '50s), star-ratings have in fact dominated discourse on movies far more than anything we know.

Readers have both demanded, and resorted to it. Writers/broadcasters have had to comply. It's unlikely that a sports fan will ever step out of a cricket match and say, "I give Dhoni two stars for his performance." It's almost imperative that the same person will walk out of a film and declare, "You gave it two stars? I give it zero!"

What kind of a hare-brained statement is that? Did the Internet, and social-media in particular, amplify this voice to the point of collective cacophony? Hell, yeah. Knocking nuance out of a conversation about a movie (which is no different from a person) you love or hate, and knowing that all it takes to rubbish/laud anything, is to rate it like a school-teacher grading students, and pretty much get away with it sounding superior, can be seriously empowering.

Movie reviewing has perennially suffered as a result. Did the movie industry benefit from this? Yes. Practically every film gets a "four-star" rating (from someone or the other). Observe the linear constellations on pretty much every Bollywood poster.

At a panel-discussion on film reviewing at the Jagran Film Festival this week (one of my many attempts at understanding how fellow reviewers approach their job), young Amul Mohan, who runs a film-trade magazine and recently produced a film, tells me about getting flooded with 'four star ratings' personally texted to him to be used against a professional reviewer's name on the film's poster the following morning. By professional, I mean those who get paid for their opinion.

Except, for whatever it's worth, the opinion, if not a bunch of generic adjectives, is a number.

I asked fellow reviewers if they'd ever done a rethink about a film they'd watched and instantly reviewed, only to realise later that it wasn't as good or as bad as it had seemed. Some of them said yes; most others, no. But can you not feel differently about a movie (as you might about a person, in hindsight)?

Perhaps.

I asked myself the same question (in my head), only to realise that I've got it wrong so many times-not the review; well, there's no right or wrong about opinion anyway, it's an expression of that moment. But the rating, which is a measure by which movies (and so much else) are bunched together - like apples and oranges that can surely be compared, because they're both fruits. But can you seriously weigh them on a scale, or a meter (3, 3.5, 4, 2.5, 1.5, etc), and expect to get the value right?

I feel Akhtar's pain. She should really rate reviewers the same way so many of them simply rate movies!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com