“Pro-religious, pro-Pakistan and anti-Indian online users are very active in the cyberspace,” he told me. (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!!!”)įahmidul 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. (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. 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. 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. That includes protesting “Gunday,” because of the film’s reference to the Bangladesh Liberation War as the Indo-Pak war. 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.įlush with success, the movement has since become an online alliance of bloggers focused on protecting Bangladesh’s history and promoting the country’s image. 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.Īfter months of protests and escalating violence from counter-protestors, Gonojagoron Moncho got its wish. He was sentenced to life in prison for his crimes by the Bangladeshi International Crimes Tribunal. 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. The protest against “Gunday” is the most recent cause célèbre of a Bangladeshi nationalist movement called Gonojagoron Moncho, or National Awakening Stage. 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 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. Of “Gunday’s” ratings, 36,000 came from outside the U.S., and 91 percent of all reviewers gave it one star. “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. Variety called it “a boisterous and entertaining period crime drama.”īut the film made a misstep that has doomed it to the bottom of the IMDb pile. The New York Times’ Rachel Saltz ended her review of “Gunday” by calling it “downright enjoyable.” gave it three out of four stars. In India, it’s the top-grossing February movie in Bollywood history. 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. “Gunday,” which came out of the huge Bollywood studio Yash Raj Films in February, isn’t that bad. Not a single qualified movie besides “Gunday” rates worse than 1.8. 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.
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