What’s the best way to react when someone criticises your art? What do you do when you’ve been slaving through sleepless nights, honing the edges of and fine-tuning a movie that is the culmination of your artistic intellect, and people don’t like it.
What do you do when someone calls your baby ‘full of plotholes’, ‘technically incorrect’ or ‘just plain bad.’
What do you do when you realise that half the views your blockbuster baby is getting after its screening are curiosity views, and the other half are cringe-watching views.
Luckily, if you are in the league of the Insecure Pakistani Filmmaker, at least three different precedents for possible (over)-reactions have been set in 2017 alone, courtesy the responses of Shaan Shahid, Sahir Lodhi, and Syed Noor to the landslide of fun knocked at them after the launch of Arth 2, Raasta and Chain Aye Na respectively.
If you choose to go with the Shaan method, it will entail taking to Twitter to pick a fight with any and all random tweeters lambasting the 138 minutes of their lives they won’t ever get back and reminding them the movie’s name is Arth- The Destination, not Arth 2.
If you instead favour the Sahir Lodhi philosophy, you would, of course, have to find the closest television studio (news channel preferred), halt all transmission and proceed to have a meltdown on live TV, angrily asking your critics who they think they are. Pro tip: try to warm up by shouting at an unsuspecting guest on your morning show to loosen up the vocal cords a little.
And, of course, the last method is Syed Noor’s classic old-timer’s trick of holding an urgent press conference in which the success of the movie (or lack thereof) is blamed on an Indian conspiracy. Secondary blame may also be assigned to jealous bloggers simply out to get The Insecure Filmmaker by criticising for the sake of criticism.
It is, of course, not to say that the year was bad for the cinema industry. In fact, ‘Punjab Nahi Jaungi’ managed to break the all-time record for the highest grossing film. But these three releases, in particular, were pretty bad to put it simply.
And while in another, more sensible, world, they would have been watched and forgotten, The Insecure Pakistani Filmmaker’s insecure defence just made the badness 100% memorable
