Whipped Cream Difficulties

I haven’t paid much attention to Nate Silver or fivethirtyeight.com, but this story (by way of the Y Combinator Twitter) pushes a couple of buttons.

What’s the worst movie ever, according to IMDB? Not “Exterminator City“, Lawrence. IMDB’s bottom ranked movie is something called “Gunday“, which David Goldenberg describes as “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“.

Is it that bad? 1.4 bad? Worse than “The Hottie and the Nottie” bad?

“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.”

(The RogerEbert.com review was written by Danny Bowes, for what it may be worth.)

So, if mainstream critics don’t think “Gunday” is so bad, how did it end up at the bottom of the IMDB rankings?

One word: crowd-sourcing.

Two words: Gonojagoron Moncho.

What? Gonojagoron Moncho is a “Bangladeshi nationalist movement” (the name translates to “National Awakening Stage”) that got very offended by “Gunday”. Specifically, they object to “Gunday”‘s depiction of the “Bangladesh Liberation War”:

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!!!”)

So “Gunday”‘s low ranking is the result of a concerted political campaign, not because it actually is a crappy movie. And what does IMDB say about this?

“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.”