Headaches and terrible movies

Each one of us has seen a bad movie at some point of time. What characterises a bad movie? Is it poor screenplay, limp direction, insipid acting skills, uninspiring storyline or a combination of two or more of the above? It is difficult to place a finger on the worst aspect of a movie that ticks you off. Nevertheless, one feels nauseated in the gut when one is forced to pay good money at a fancy multiplex for three hours of self inflicted torture. I was lucky in this regard since I at least did not waste any money on this monster of all bad movies – ‘I Hate Love Storys’. I managed to watch it on the Internet (Long live, Thee Internet). The server hosting the movie had broken it down into six parts and over a span of six gruelling days, I managed to watch the whole movie. For sake of self preservation, I dared not see more than 1/6th of the movie every 24 hour. Each day, I would click on a link for one part and pray for that segment of the movie to have a tiny measure of sense or sensibility. No such luck. Right from the very first 1/6 part till the last 6/6 part, the movie got progressively worse. What was Karan Johar thinking? Why did he put his money in the most unbearable movie ever made?

In my opinion, I Hate Love Storys(IHLS) should be the new yardstick against which all bad movies are measured. Initially I thought, probably movies could be given a rating of 1 to 10 IHLS depending on how tortured the viewer was feeling by the end of the movie. But logic would then state that a 3 IHLS movie is thrice as bad as the original IHLS. This is an impossible scenario since IHLS is the worst ever. So I decided to go with the calculation that 1 IHLS (100%) being the highest rating, how bad a movie is can be rated as 0.5 IHLS(half as bad or 50%), 0.2 IHLS (one fifth as bad or 20%) etc, etc. For those of you who did not pay attention in school to fractions and percentages, this might be a slightly challenging scale to comprehend. However, please rest assured it is comprehensive and accurate. Of course to truly understand the implication of each rating, one will have to watch 'I Hate Love Storys' so that one has a mental image to calibrate the other movies against. My suggestion, catch the movie online. It is not worth even a penny. (I apologise to the Copyrights people and of course to the recording industry, to the producer etc for encouraging the ever booming Internet piracy).

What about the incorrect plural of story? I don’t believe they were exercising their poetic license when they decided to use ‘storys’. In a world where SMS lingo is the norm and vowels are being dropped like hot potatoes, one does not need to confuse a child or even an educated adult by using bad grammar in movie titles. My bet, more than 50% of the kids in schools will at least once use ‘storys’ as a plural in an English test and lose marks for it just because he/she thought KJo always spells correctly. But that is for another day.