By Ali Baylay

Cast:Emeka Ike, Van Vicker, Prince Ike, Tonto Dikeh; Produced by Pressing Forward Productions; Black Star Entertainment; Screenplay: Greg Chyke Inawodoh. 145 Minutes.

There’re really guys like this: wise guys, fast talking, tough-talking, smooth-talking and confident- building guys who can present before you a heaven on earth. They’re not your 9 to 5 kind of guys. They live by scamming, pilfering, lying, deceiving and robbing, peddling guns and drugs. They’re the best dressed, they hang out with big shots-governors, ministers, bank managers, board of directors; and they shop for, and use beautiful women and later wad them off  like flies, and beside the cordon of securities, there’s always one henchman hanging around them with a briefcase full of money. These days in modern African countries, stringent financial difficulties creates certain nostalgia for their brand of lifestyle-easy living.

Andy (Emeka Ike) is a medical doctor who cannot find job or client so he can feed himself, as he sits lamenting and soliloquizing in his little scantily dressed apartment. Then saunters in Emeka (Prince Eke), dejectedly looking after another interview flop. While both are blaming their misfortunes on the government and their gods, then comes in Jerry (Van Vicker) who is offered N15000 for a job not quite made clear in the film. These three characters assumingly bunk together in this apartment. At certain point they look like the three stoogies.

Their luck soon change when per chance Andy saves a client’s life from heart attack and this client, Chief Braimor happens to be a big time drug dealer. Being poor, and down on their lucks the three idlers soon become Chief Braimor’s drug delivery people. The three are still living together, except their condition has changed a notch up, and we see them showering party girls with lots of nairas and dollar bills at a private party, in their new marble floor apartment.

Here’s where Marshals as a story has pitfalls: First,the story doesn’t justify the title. We see Jerry and Emeka ones in the traffic, each with a briefcase, one getting in a car, and the other on a bike. What makes them become marshals doesn’t have to be just a single shot of delivery. What happens to the principle of three in story telling? I did not see any action out of the ordinary (eg. mob) that could make them  marshals for what they do except seeing them getting  in traffic.  

There’s too much telling and no showing: We never ever see what the said marshals are trading in (cocaine, pills, marijuana, counterfeit etc), nor the type of people they do business with. There’s no establishment of link between Andy, Emeka and Jerry. All these do not have history to connect them together except the fact that they live in one bedroom apartment.  Lastly, the plot line involving Cathy (Tonto Dikeh) takes so much steam out of this lackluster story.  I wonder why this plot is necessary because it doesn’t  move the story at all. Excuse me if Andy’s  gonna fall in love with her, or she’ll hire Emeka to kill Chief Braimor, in part 3, but that remain to be seen.

Until I see part 3 and see these interactions in the resolution, Marshals does not measure to its name. Indeed not all. I can guess here the writer’s aim for this story is to take a pardoxical shot at the ills of our society, and which is somehow achieved. But as a story form, and structure, the goal is not achieved.

BY DAVID AJIBOYE

Jim Iyke has been variously described as Nollywood’s playboy -a serial heart breaker, one whose motto vis-a-vis relationships with women, appears to be “use them and leave them.” Tabloid stories about his sexual escapades are in volumes, leaving many to wonder what he is looking for in a woman or if he will ever find that unique woman who will melt his heart and make him entertain the thoughts of walking down the aisle.

During a recent encounter with Jim, the issue of his playboy image and stories of his sexual liaisons were exhaustively probed. As reported before, he vehemently denied being a playboy, however, admitting that “a million women may pass through your life, but only one will stick and strike that chord in you.” It appears that that one woman may have finally materialized, and struck a strong chord in Jim Iyke’s life.

Jim Iyke

There have been some rumors and published speculations that the handsome actor may have finally found a woman of his dreams – a fact that he has neither denied nor confirmed, until now. Jim Iyke was asked explicitly if he had finally found the elusive dream woman, and if so, what qualities stood her out of the numerous others that competed for his heart, love and affection?

Smiling infectiously, Jim volunteered, “I am going to tell you everything you need to know. As a matter of fact, I am going to use this opportunity to finally break my silence over this issue. As you rightly pointed out, a lot has been written about my new found love, most of them largely speculative in nature.

“Yes, it is true. I have found the woman of my dreams, and we are in love in totality. She is the embodiment of all that I have been looking for: tall, pretty, exotic and supremely intelligent. I was looking for a woman who would complement and reinforce my intellectually curious mind -someone who would add and not subtract, and I’m happy to admit that I have finally found her. Her name is Phil, and I would leave it at that.”

How They Met, “I met Phil sometime last year in the United States. She’s of Caribbean ancestry – more specifically Jamaican. We had a movie shot in Baltimore and Phil was invited by her then friend, Ruth Okoro, to the set, and we had an instant connection. Initially, I thought I was just going to have a good time with her, and keep it moving.

But her beauty, intellect, deeply ingrained values and an abiding capacity to understand and deconstruct me struck me. No other woman I had met ever took time to learn who I was, and what elements and values define my entire being.

Phil’s love for me was not based on my fame, rather she cared much about Jim Iyke, as an individual and not Jim Iyke as a star-actor and Nollywood superstar.

Jim Iyke

I have always believed in the partnership of body, soul and the mind. Oftentimes, the women that crossed my path in the past were more interested in the partnership of the body. But Phil possesses both the intellectual ability and the traditional values that were in short supply with my recent past relationships.” In the past few months, the tabloid
newspapers had regaled their readers with the case of betrayal on the part of Jim’s new found love.

According to reports, “Phil, supplanted and betrayed her close friend, Ruth Okoro, who was said to be seeing Jim Iyke at the time she introduced her then best friend, Phil to the Nollywood Sexiest Actor.” As a result of this betrayal, the two erstwhile friends are mortal enemies today. Asked if he ever had an affair with Ruth, Jim replied in the negative.

“No. Ruth is not my kind of woman, and the notion that I was seeing her is totally preposterous. How could I be seeing Ruth, when she was even married to my boy, Philips Ehigiwina? She was sleeping around with Emeka Ike. I have values and moral ethos, and those values were in conflict with what I was seeing.

That was the reason I called Ruth’s husband in Texas, and asked him to come to Maryland and see what his wife was doing with Emeka Ike.

Ruth was caught red handed in bed with Emeka Ike, and she knows this to be the truth. All the nonsense that was written about my alleged jealousy because Ruth was seeing both Emeka and me, were pieces of junk journalism. It is true that Ruth introduced me to Phil. I didn’t need to deny that.

I saw a winner in Phil and I went for her. I have no regrets. What Ruth wanted from me, unfortunately, I couldn’t give it to her because of the fact that I have some morals in me. All the negative things she has said about Phil never bothered me because I know who she is, and I am comfortable with who she is.”

By Ali Baylay

To put it bluntly, this is a movie that attempts at the inner state of mind of the center character, Sandra (Genevivie Nnaji), but we never get acquainted with her motivation for the kind of rebel without cause behavior of Sandra.

Nwafor Anayo’s For Better or For Worse (2003), starts with Sandra  entering her father’s  living-room-turned-dance-hall, full of partying guests, and with her nose in the air, she weeds unfavorable members from the guests and ask them out. And even as she takes the floor, no one dares join her, until she beckons them to the floor. Here, we are introduced to Sandra as an insolent, cigarette-smoking rich girl who attends a parochial school, in a rundown neighborhood, where she’s hailed as a queen.

She’s heedless to the warnings and threats of both her father and a step-mother she dares not set eyes upon. There’s not a single attribute for the wanton behavior Sandra carries on in this movie, only for the fact that her mother is past, how long, story doesn’t tell,  but raised by her father and his second wife.

Sandra goes from one self-destructive behavior to another. She steals money and other belongings from her father, buys drugs and throws elaborate hotel pool-party, and in a drunken stupor, she hits a child  with her car almost to death. At this point, Sandra seems possessed by a demon, but is rescued from damnation by Michael (Emeka Ike), a boy friend with a humble background. For the sake of Michael’s love, her high wire destructive behavior simmers a little as she accepts constrains placed on her by him, and that takes a hundred and eighty degrees turn in her character.

Sandra and Michael enjoy a short period of relative peace of love until the uncompromising father of her offers Michael an ultimatum that askews the relationship:  Become pilot trainee in the father’s airline company and have a career in exchange for Sandra. Michael accepts career as a pilot  reluctantly, and Sandra is turned down by Michael even as she dogs him all over town.

Michael goes on to become a pilot and Sandra goes abroad to the US for studies. However, a big chunk of Sandra’s love remains in Michael’s heart as he keeps her picture with him  in the cockpit of the plane. Sandra comes back to town from the US with a fiancee, Jonnathan (Clem Ohameze), a four-one-nine don, and happens to run into Michael at a restaurant. There’s a brawl between the two fellas-Michael and Jonathan.

After series of attempts to take Sandra back from the American boy, even to the point that he loses his job with the airline, and crashes his car in a self-suicidal mission, he relents. Sandra and her parents find Jonnathan is fake and tricks him on his last mission to pilfer one hundred thousand dollars from Sandra’s father, by paying him off in counterfeit dollars, as long as he leaves Sandra and never comes back. Sandra goes knocking at Michael’s door for forgiveness, and when Michael couldn’t, she decides to go back to the states to finish her schooling.

For Better or For Worse isn’t about for better  for worse,  because, there isn’t a scene where marital vow is exchanged to validate  title of this movie. It is neither a lesson for overprotective parents, nor lesson for wanton children nor a blueprint for Romeo and Juliet,  but a share 226 minutes of past time .

Director Emeka H. Umeasor, takes  a close and personal look at Sins of Rachael. You can find it so in the composition of the shots as they interpret on screen.  The  excessive use of extreme close-ups, and medium close-ups bring even viewers closer to the events and characters on screen. Beautiful shots befitting beautiful story.

Screenwriter Andy Nwakalor weaves a beautiful drama here too for our viewing pleasure. He tells the story of Rachael (Joy Torty), a fountainhead character and a straight faced born-again christian believer, whose father, Chief Nnaji (Jim Lawson Madweke) for his own political ambitions, wants her marry Christopher (Akume Akume). Rachael in turn is in love with a choir boy Sunday (Mike Ezuruonye), from her church. Yet, in obedience to the word of the bible, as thus, “obey thy father’, she asks her suitor Christopher if he could find a place in his heart for Christ in exchange for politics.

Christopher is a born, bred, groomed, nurtured, tutored, carved, and schooled politician (a politician with manaical disposition, though) finds Rachael’s ultimatum impossible. His father could even skin him alive for joining the church. Both Sunday and Christopher jostle for Rachael’s hand in marriage anyway, until Rachael on her way from church choir practice, is raped by Steve (Emeka Ike, the devil worshipper who brutally murders his mother in the Warriors of Satan) and conceives thereon. The story goes into turbo gear.

The household of Chief Nnaji is in disarray by this incident. Rachael’s pregnancy will sure ruin his politics and therefore wants abortion, or she and her mother should leave his household. Both Christopher and Sunday go ballistic in their different ways: Christopher couldn’t stand the thought of that THING  in  Rachael’s stomach. Sunday calls Rachael’s unborn child, ‘bastard’, and doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. Rachael in the middle of this rigmarole, is playing it by the will of God, but no abortion. Her Character, except for frequent outburst in cries, is completely flat and anti-radioactive.

The drama takes yet another turn when Rachael runs into her raper, Steve, and confronts him with the truth. Rachael wants confession and acceptance of God for his evils, so she can forgive him. Steve easily accepts Christ alright, but before Rachael could have his child, Christopher murders him. At his bedside, Rachael witnesses Chief Nnaji (her father) accepts Christ. Christopher enters the same scene, a giant-size cross like a burden of sin, hanging on his neck, obviously a born again christian. Sunday repents and marries Rachael after she put to bed her fatherless baby girl.

The biblical Rachael’s sin, if it could be so called, is when she steals her father Leban’s god as she escapes with her husband Jacob, into Israel. But Andy Nwakalor’s Sins of Rachael cries out loud two philosophical thoughts: Good versus evil. Spiritualism versus existentialism. This script is the writer’s uneqivocal take on Nollywood’s obsession with both political and financial aggrandizement, in disregard for fear of God as Rachael portrays.

This side of the Atlantic (America) we call Sins of Rachael, a beautiful testament to Rowe versus Wade (pro-life versus Pro-choice). Simply put.

Ali Baylay/Publisher