By Ali Baylay

A DEVINE TOUCH PRODUCTION. Starring: John Dumelo, Tonto Dikeh, Jibola Dabo, Ashley Nwosu; Production Manager: Emeka Ojiafor; Story/Screenplay: Chisom Juliet Okereke; Editor: Okiki David; Continuity:  Winning Team; Executive Producers: Kingsley Okereke, Emeka Igwemba; Director: Theodore Anyanji. 130 mins. c2009

Even though My Fantasy is a movie based on phantasma, you’ll ask yourself where on earth such power in one person exists as in Sir Rufus, when he could imprison another citizen at will.  I guess this will only happen in Nollywood or Gollywood where conventional statutory law does not apply. But it’s all good to see strange bed fellows like Gollywood and Nollywood, team together on a project such as My Fantasy. Nollywwod has a trait of getting the job done in a record time before the sun sets, and Gollywood with a Knack for quality, to a large extent in shots

In a curious way, My Fantasy reminds me of Indecent Proposal in which Robert Redford offered Woody Harrison one million dollars for a time with his wife, Demi Moore. Having a tight time and running out of it to redeem his architectural masterpiece (house) from foreclosure, he has to give in. My Fantasy is a movie in which Sir Rufus, makes such an indecent proposal to Joe. Joe works for Sir Rufus’s night club, and happens to get caught on camera crossing a shady deal. He’s called to answer to the accusation in front of Sir Rufus and found guilty of the crime. As a punishment, he’s locked up in a cellar at the club.

When Joe’s daughter would trace her father back to the club, she found herself in the presence of Sir Rufus, who demands her love in return for the money her father stole from him. Being pushed against the wall and have no other option, Joe agrees to give his daughter over to Sir Rufus as a pawn.

In a memorable film moment, Joe hammers his reason home to the daughter by disclosing to her that he’s not her real father. Amidst tears, the daughter has no choice but to succumb to the most gruesome sexual ordeal Nollywood has ever brought to our living rooms.

I have a problem with this film, if I could be honest. In theory of film, the premise of My Fantasy is to present a formidable villain who needs a formidable hero to break his wings. Sir Rufus is presented as a formidable villain, who can lock fellow citizens in his private den without recourse, and in fact no one dares cross the barricade of securities that man his private empire. By virtue of his position as a Goliath, the script needed a stone throwing David. But instead of David, Micheal is trashed into oblivion and never heard or seen again until we see him in a drunken stupor making it out with another woman.

 Even as Joe could make one last ditch effort to get his daughter back from Sir Rufus, he’s warded off like a fly as he lamely borrows from Arnold in the Terminator, and scurries off from the scene, “I’ll be back”. He never gets back, but goes into oblivion too. I guess he’s in the imaginary world of My Fantasy, drowning in both brandy and his guilty conscience.

We wouldn’t have taken Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet seriously hadn’t they decided to die in each other’s arm for the sake of love. In most modern films, evil is always punished. We the audience [OB1] demand retribution and redemption: that those in difficulty shall be freed; those lost shall eventually find the way out, that philandering woman will note that a love of a husband and to raise a family shall bring the union a full life. Here in My Fantasy, there’s no stake, and an educated audience can neither fully sympathize with Rosie, nor Michael, nor Joe, for they show no steadfastness in their characters.

By American standard of rating movies, My Fantasy would have passed more as an x-rated flick than a film an African parent could watch with his children. The phallic desire expressed in the character of Sir Rufus: the roar in bed like a lion, and especially in the last scene where Rosie completely succumbs to his kinky, brutal and sexual desire and both start getting naked, is certainly not meant for the average African family. However, at curtain down, I went in the shower, got lost in my own fantasy and took a long hot bath.

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 Ali Baylay

Cast: Van Vicker, Chika Ike, Desmond Elliot, Tonto Dikeh. Screeenplay: Chidi Chijioke. Director: Ikechukwu Onyeke. Sky Movies Ltd.

“They are from decent christian families aspiring to be university graduates but after admission, they find out that it is not all rosy.” that’s how the sales pitch at the back of the scabbard of the dvd of  Before the Rain goes. While intensely watching this flick of university kids with my twelve years old daughter, she made a remarkable observation that would have totally escaped my critical viewing eye: “Daddy, your African university campuses look overgrowth and shuddy,” she complained. In most cases, I stood in defence of our age old Africa, and blame it on the bias of western media, but this time I was cornered.

There in front of me on the screen, in a major Nollywood production, the principal location of a story of university students on the campus of Namdi Azikwe University, are overgrowth and unkept fields, squalid environment, classrooms with  ricketty desks that don’t measure up to a primary school in today Africa. If  the right location adds up to the beauty and believability of a movie, Before the Rain’s location doesn’t pass.

That brings us to the story itself. Before the Rain is supposedly a story of Mercy (Tonto Dikeh) and Anita (Chika Ike-she would have been smashing without the fake thick eyelid which did not march the color of her eyebrow). Both leave home in a beat-up old car, evident of a poor background, on a trip to stay on a university campus. On campus, Anita and Fabian (van Vicker) soon fall out when he discovers that Anita has similar disease his one time girl had. Mercy has a series of run-ins with the Social Lady of the campus and at one point her gang  jump her and trash her (No campus securities?). Mercy absconds from campus and comes back a different butt-kicking no-nonsense gangtser, who can have Anita’s boyfriends at will. Motive, your guess is good as mine.

Anita cries a lot in this film, but in the end laughs the last laugh, when Raymond (Desmond Elliot), who had saved her life once by taking her to the hospital and both  fall in love later, brings his father to ask Anita’s hand in marriage. Like they say in screenwriting classes, if you can’t get much out of a character, kill it. Mercy ends up going to jail, and society lady ends up on the floor of her pad, dead with a bullet wound to her forehead. Before the Rain is more about Anita, hence she survives  the campus chaos around her unscathed.

Before the Rain falls, there is thunder, a distant murmur followed by a sparkle of lightning in the sky, the tropical cloud gathers hurriedly, there’s paleness everywhere, the chicks hurry to their coops, marketters gather their wares. And the rain comes and it pours. Was there rain in Before the Rain? I guess not, for the parts of this film do not come together. There’s no rhythm established so that there could be form, shape and climax building up tension and exploding it.