In the aftermath of the disastrous box-office collections of well-meaning, middle of the road films like LuckByChance and the perplexingly good performance of ‘Mass-Entertainers’ like Singh is King, isn’t it high time that the Indian film industry abandoned its age based U/ A rating system and came up with another more practical system that is more consumerate with the wildly fluctuating IQ levels encountered vis-à-vis our desi demographics?
Firstly, the Universal and Adult ratings are wholly redundant in the present day circumstances. Most film makers strive for a U or at least a U/A rating to be able to cater to a wider audience. And with the majority of the moolah splurging multiplex audience belonging to the 15-25 age group, who can disagree with that argument? An Adult movie is a no-no for family outings anyway. Secondly, after the cable TV and Internet revolution, Indian films have stopped being dark-dungeon salvation material for the masses that they used to be in the last quarter of the 20th century. Today, you have the choicest of unmentionables available not only on TV and the Net but even on the prepaid 2 inch screen of your cell phone, if you may so prefer.
What an actual IQ rated system of rating for films would do is to make their target audiences aware of the level of intellect required to watch/appreciate a movie; i.e.how many ounces of gray cells they need to carry to the theatre when they venture out to watch a film. For example a dense comedy like Welcome could rate itself 60+ but below 100 while the baffling No Smoking would definitely be rated at least 130+. With the price of tickets having quadrapled in the last ten years, this would not only help the average film-fanatic get good value for his money, it would also help the curiously delineating niche segments mind their own target audiences without having to resort to pathetically ghisa-pita TV ad-lines like ‘hat-ke plot/treatments’ and ‘wholesome entertainment.’ By curiously delineating niche segments, I mean categories like yuppie metropolitan corn flake(YMCF) who don’t mind Rahul Bose’s asinine facial ticks in Woody Allen remakes and rich but conservative (RBC) Rajarshi khandaan replicas who’ve been the saving grace of retrograde time-warps like Vivaah.
Think about it. By just adding an IQ rating to their films, directors can shrugg off the herculean responsibility of appealing to a wider audience and concentrate on more bedroom banter or chaste Saat-pheras, whatever their bread and butter maybe. And with the proliferation/migration of small town mindsets to the bludgeoning metros, this system would definitely work better than a simplistic approach of large city/small town segregation. Thanks to the economic upswing/IT revolution, we have sizeable international audiences in modest, sleepy townships like Mysore and more bhaiyyas than the hapless Shiv-Sainiks can possibly handle on the streets of Mumbai. For every taxi-wallah that they grab and rough up, there are four doodhwalas that scamper away with splashing cans of milk/water.
In time, high IQ films could become the benchmark for intellectual appraisement, much like difficult to decipher school/college tomes that the general janta usually shunned ( Physics by Iridov and Fountainhead by Ayn Rand). Then, just being spotted with the tickets for a Anurag Kashyap film would be enough to raise eyebrows and earn solemn reverence in peer circles.
This is how a multiplex lobby conversation would go:-
‘Did you know the film’s rated IQ 127.5 when you bought the tickets?’
‘I did. Even though I may not comprehend it fully, I’m hoping to concentrate and increase my level from 110 to at least 120 by the end of show.’
‘Impossible! How?’
‘Don’t believe me? I’m watching it for the third time today and my IQs already gone up from 90 to 100.’
‘Wow! I never knew it was that simple!’
‘It isn’t. But I have a friend whose IQ is 140 and she’s here to help me.(wink) It’s called joint-watching….’
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