Hacker Cinema
Gunday
गुंडे
2014 · Film · 152 min
Directed by Ali Abbas Zafar
The lives of Calcutta's most powerful gangsters - Bikram and Bala, changes when Nandita enters it. Then a counter-force takes charge and a thriller unfolds.
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7 comments on Hacker News
So negative reviews has escalated very quickly. Bot or not, I normally trust IMDB ratings. Any movie with rating 6 and above is at least one time watchable. Any series having rating less than 6.5 is not worth. There could be exceptions off course. Are there any interesting incidence of purposefully negative reviews on imdb? One I know of is [1]. The Indian movie Gunday was bomb shelled by Bangladeshi community as some historical reference was not proper.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/t he-story-behind-the-worst-movie-on-imdb/
I really find it hard to believe that you have never heard of Mafia involvement in Cola mines of Bihar even though your dad worked in Coal India. However just because you did not hear of it does not mean it doesn't exist.
There is a while section about this on Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_Raj
And this : https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://businessworld.in/amp/article/CBI-searches-in-W-Bengal-Jharkhand-Bihar-UP-in-coal-mafia-scam/28-11-2020-347652&ved=2ahUKEwiWlKvwxdnxAhUkB50JHSVICtgQFjAGegQIJRAC&usg=AOvVaw2lhvkCuAe2Hdy_GZzx5diN&cf=1
Also this : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suryadeo_Singh
There are also a bunch of Bollywood movies with Coal Mafia as a background. "Gunday", though not about coal Mafia, is pretty entertaining.
I do find IMDB's ratings breakdown fascinating to explore, though.
For example, you can look at the 50 Shades films or A Dog's Purpose or (especially) Gunday and have a pretty good idea that lots people are giving them bad ratings without having seen the films. (Their weighted average ratings are supposed to combat that, but they don't seem to be doing a very good job.)
Some very interesting analysis, and in some ways, it raises even more interesting questions about the sampling at IMDB. Who is filling out IMDB reviews and ratings? How many segments are there among the raters, and to what extent are they truly representative of the general, TV-watching population?
Looking at the list, for instance, you see that Dragon Ball Z shows up as one of the highest-rated shows of its decade. Now, perhaps a truly randomized, representative sample of the population really would rank Dragon Ball Z as one of the greatest TV series ever made. But my gut tells me that's unlikely. More likely is that a big cluster of fans of the show have self-selected into rating it highly. What you're actually seeing, in this case, is the power of a very vocal, very rabid niche. [1]
This same effect, in reverse, can artificially deflate the ratings of shows and movies that a vocal minority of the population rallies against. This appears to be the case with Gunday, one of the lowest-rated movies on the site, which David Goldenberg of FiveThirtyEight discusses in a very interesting post: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-story-behind-the-worst-movie-on-imdb/
Finally, we need to filter the data set for size. Ice TV, a show from 1996 with all of 6 ratings on its IMDB page, probably wouldn't pass our gut check for "Best of the 90s," alongside shows like The Sopranos and Friends, which probably got ratings more or less representative of public opinion.
This is a fascinating subject and a really compelling start. But the next step in this sort of analysis is developing a reasonable methodology for parsing and reconciling quality, quantity, and clusters. To give the author due credit, he expresses the appropriate amount of skepticism or reservation when showing results. And his observations about genre and overall trends are fascinating to see.
[1] Of course, this raises some intriguing questions about what, exactly, a "quality" show is. A show that has a large, thriving fanbase is a great show to that fanbase. And to the extent it's attracted a sizable, rabid following, it can probably be said to be a great show in general -- even if it's not everyone's cup of tea. And that's probably fine. Obviously not every show is going to appeal to everyone in the population. Nevertheless, strong-niche shows confound our idea of "generally" great shows and make normative comparisons very hard to do, unless we start factoring for things like strength of sentiment.
I don't understand this part: "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".
To me that's just stating the obvious. Of course if there is such a thing as a worst movie then it will have a higher percentage of 1 star votes than other movies. So I don't know how that's evidence for anything except that the movie seems to be bad.
Well, interestingly, the problem here isn't quite that people are giving the movie false reviews. They might genuinely hate when this sort of thing happens -- bitter fights over terminology aren't particularly rare. The "problem" here is that they care more about the movie than do the general population of movie-watchers; if everyone on earth had to watch Gunday and rate it on imdb, all of these people might honestly rate it 1, but they would all be swamped by reviews from people who thought it was decent (and that group would likely be swamped by other 1-star reviews from people who didn't speak the language, but try not to focus on them).
It's similar to the problem of an author's "best" or most notable works getting lower crowd-sourced reviews than their average work. What happens there is that generally people only bother to read, and subsequently review, books that they think there's a good chance they'll like. If you're a mediocre author putting out filler in your genre, your 6th, average, book will get pretty good reviews because everyone who bought it knew what they were getting. If your 7th book happens to be excellent, hype will induce a lot of people who don't like your genre to buy it and see what everyone's talking about -- and they'll take it out on you in their reviews afterwards.
I prefer the IMdB's ratings system over, say, meta-site Rotten Tomatoes.
At Rotten Tomatoes they rated Seth Rogen-vehicle "Neighbors" as 100%, last I checked. Meaning only: no reviewer at that point had said it was awful. And yet, I saw it and it was awful.
At IMdB, I can see that it rates as 7.6/10.0, and also that teenager voters loved it (9.0/10.0), where older viewers hated it (5.0/10.0). Far more useful information.
Gunday (the film of the parent article) gets fairer treatment from the IMdB's top 1000 users, who rate it 4.9/10.0