Celebrity Column: Everyone's a critic! Writes Sajid Khan

Definition of a critic: A person who judges the merits of literary or artistic works, especially one who does so professionally. Definition of a reviewer: A person who writes critical appraisals of books, plays, films, etc. for publication. Definition of an audience: The assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film, concert, or meeting. Google baba ki jai ho! Clearly, three different segments of people. But, today, the critic is the audience, the audience is the reviewer, and the reviewer is the critic. Kuch toh gadbad hai!

Do critics matter to the audience? Yes and no. Does every member of the audience read reviews first and then watch a film? Yes and no. Does the reviewer review a film while watching it at a private screening for selected media personnel or with the general audience? Yes and no. Do the stars in a review really matter to the stars of Bollywood? Yes and no. Today, every Bollywood portal has its own set of critics and reviewers, along with certain members of the audience, who have become recognisable faces. The funniest ones are those who come out of single screens and give the films a certain rating. For some strange reason, most Sunny Leone films always have received maximum stars, even though they didn’t work at the box office. The truth is — in the time of absolute minute-by-minute information around the globe, we are incredibly misinformed due to hyped perceptions. I kid you not, my family doctor went to watch Newton because he genuinely thought that it’s nominated for the Oscars. The truth is that the film is just India’s official entry for the Oscars. Whether it gets nominated or not, is up to the goras. Oops, racism? Sorry! Up to the white people. My director even felt that Newton didn’t deserve the four-star rating. It deserved three-and-a-half stars. The first half was good, according to him, but the second half was so-so. Yaar, this happens only in India. Even when we talk about films, leave alone reviewing it, we divide it into the first and second halves. But this kind of talk is, more so, discussed by the fourth member of the brigade. Not the critic, or the audience or the reviewer. But the trade pundits.

Trade pundits often change their reviews of a film, according to the daily business. For example, a few trade pundits said Golmaal Again would not do more than a `125 crore lifetime in India, as they felt it wasn’t a good film. I personally disagree. The moment the film crossed `200 crore, the same trade pundits changed their viewpoint completely. Now, that’s strange. Suppose you bought a book, read it and didn’t like it.

Are you going to start loving it suddenly, once the book is called a bestseller? Today, there are agencies that, for a yearly fee, do surveys with 1,000-5,000 people and tell you whether your film will be a hit or a flop. Most of them in the crowd are college students, who download rampantly, and are technically not the potential ticket buyers. So, now an illegal downloader is going to tell me how much business my film is going to do on the opening day and whether my film will work or not. Have we all gone mad? There is no science to art.

There are a few critics, reviewers, and trade pundits, who just like the majority of the audiences, love and understand films and are unbiased towards good cinema — commercial or not. They are the real critics. Everyone else, are they really critics?