Warning: These are the confessions of a baby critic entering adolescence. Read without discretion at your own risk!
When you write your first review, you are a movie lover—just a girl who enjoys watching movies. There’s a boy you like, he’s into movies too, but he talks about it like it’s rocket science and you’re drawn to his intellectual swagger.
After watching a rom-com that lights up your dreary afternoon in the year 2012, you’re so chuffed, you write about it. You send him your review, or love letter — depending on what lens he reads it with. In minutes, he’s done reading and his feedback scathes you for the rest of the day.
“This is not a review, this is gossip.” He doesn’t stop there, “God, I hated this film, how could you watch that?” His critique or list-of-wrong-things-done could fill your room with so much paper, leaving you no room to breathe.
You feel like a fool for liking the movie or for telling him you liked it. Is this what reviews do to people? Why do people even read those things? Isn’t a review supposed to make you love the film more?
You’re flooding your innocent review notebook with tears when it dawns on you that the boy you like is playing hard to get. You go online, determined to learn the lingo of this critiquing world and give the braggart a taste of his own medicine.
All kinds of film writers exist online, you skip past the ones that read like yours, too simple, too bland, not erudite enough, not what you want…
In a few years, you skip watching Nollywood altogether. There’s little or nothing to critique in ‘their movies’; they’re crass, crude and for people who lack knowledge of the essence of cinema (in Future Boyfriend’s voice). While you navigate your own biases, Nollywood is embroiled in challenges.
The DVD/movie rental fad is fading fast, and filmmakers and free-to-air channels scramble for a place on DSTV. Not every home can afford it, but all the good stuff is on it, and outside it, there’s almost nothing to watch. Except, there is…
It’s a new website pirating Nigerian movies — the good ones that manage to find their way to Kene Okwuosa’s FilmOne — and making them available for folks like you who love movies but for whom accessing them has become akin to passing through the needle’s eye.
It was because of this website that you were able to watch your Kunle Afolayan-directed rom-com.
Oh thank God for Kunle Afolayan, where would your love-life, sorry, film-watching-life be without him?! And that boy had the guts to call you stupid for loving such a beautiful film. You’re still not sure if you love that film, or if you should even love it based on your current status.
You’re a Hollywood girl now, the only thing missing is a t-shirt and a hat saying ‘I heart Nollywood-sorry-Hollywood.’
You’re catching up on Breaking Bad and Doctor Who. You’re binge-reading film criticism on Roger Ebert, which is more of a movie promotions business than a critics’ library. You adore Viola Davis for her role in Fences, a movie that made you cry, although the theme and dialogue went over your head. You revere Robert McDowney Jr for being God, or rather, Iron Man.
Yet, scenes from Omugwo and Aki and Paw Paw — the old originals, not the revamped ones, definitely not! — are still fresh in your mind. Only after you’ve caught yourself laughing at their golden old jokes do you realise how relatable they still are. But you are not that girl anymore. Will you ever be that girl again?
You answer for yourself. You believe you’re enlightened, more educated, and you know better than to let your intelligence be reduced by films that Future Boyfriend will never see. Your conscience nags at you, it says you’re being haughty and insecure, shying away from your truth.
One day, in a Film History class, you learn the difference between the story structures in Hollywood and the ones found in Nollywood home videos.
Hollywood has borrowed from all variants of storytelling to stick with the most repeatable, most arresting and therefore most bankable, and they serve it movie after movie. The pattern is simple: specific character(s) tries to do one thing, another thing(s) gets in the way. The removal of the thing or things in the way takes two hours or less, and wraps up tightly.
The films you grew up on took three hours, sometimes four. They had parts one, two, three and four, up to part six, at times. And you were the child who made sure to see all the parts, or your love-life, sorry, movie-watching-life, would know no peace.
There were the evil matriarch genres where Patience Ozokwor ruled her home and our screens with an iron fist. Then the slapsticks where the main character did a myriad of unrelated things that made you laugh till your ribcage stood out. Think Nkem Owoh in Johnbull and Rosekate, and John Okafor in Mr Ibu. There were other types: the Blood Money horror types, which couldn’t get enough of Kanayo O. Kanayo.
Fathia Balogun and Saheed Balogun were not lost on you: their faces featured the most in movies where one person triumphs over the other, all praise to voodoo. Then there were the Glamour Girls types — no, not the revamped one, pleasssssse! —where self-confessed call-girls snatched rich husbands and lived to bitch about in Queen’s English for three hours of screen-time.
You love the list above, but when you put it side by side with your new tastes, you ask yourself just why you loved those silly movies that have no regard for, again, the essence of cinema.
The memo hasn’t reached you that Hollywood is a production factory serving an audience with culture and ideologies that differ widely from yours. And when you cry for diversity at the Oscars, you’re forgetting that talk is cheap and Oscar-worthy movies are not. But from a galaxy far far away, a glimmer of hope appears.
Certain Nigerians begin returning home from the abroad. This happens a few years after the Kunle Afolayan-led renaissance that birthed Irapada and The Figurine.
These Nigerians make a big claim: we’re going to tell our stories ourselves. We’re going to show Hollywood we can do it too. You’re not the one who says this. The EbonyLife Boss does. And she makes quite a splash with Fifty.
All the characters sound bougie. They ride expensive cars, drink exotic wine, and do air quotes or something like it when they speak.
You write a review. Umm, not a review, you call it a critique. For you, it’s a bad copy of some American movie you’ve seen. Future Boyfriend is proud of your work, but he still won’t ask you out. You’re just movie buddies now.
The Ebony-Life Boss follows it up with a massive collaboration, The Wedding Party (2016). Everybody in it comes from Jand and the only people who don’t are poor. You write another essay. You say the rich promote the rich, it’s not diverse enough, the poor can’t relate with it, this unbridled thirst for oyibo validation will never cease…
It does well at the box office. Your response — Well, it’s nothing compared to Hollywood numbers. You read that this is something that’s never been done before, not since the time Papa Ajasco went to cinemas in Nineteen-oh-oh. Still not impressive. Just like the critics you used to hate, you too have entered elitist mode.
You still haven’t gotten the memo: NOBODY IS TRYING TO IMPRESS YOU. And because no one is trying to impress you, more filmmakers join the show-the-oyibo-people camp.
Bolanle Austen-Peters signs up with Bling Lagosians. Two years before that, there was another clan called Biola Alabi Media (BAM), and they produced the incredibly confusing Banana Island Ghost, which you have no problem trashing in your reviews because what you and some of your kind call review is malice in ink.
With each inciting piece you write, your friends whittle because you’ve become a vibe-killing thought police, telling them what movies not to like, and why not to like them.
They’re ashamed to own up to you that they’re hooked on Ruth Kadiri’s YouTube channel, where the badly behaved girl often learns her lesson when she loses the man of her dreams to the meeker girl. You’re not old enough to respect people’s choices, so you keep on thought-policing. But new trends are sweeping in.
Jenifa — a show about an ambitious, razz hairdresser — is doing viewer numbers on television that no one ever thought possible in the internet age. Fast forward to 2019, Netflix is in the building, the oyibo attention we’ve been seeking is hia BUT they’re looking for something else: “indigenous African stories.” So much for Oyibo attention. You write a piece about it in a newspaper that nobody reads.
Then it begins, the radical shift from Fifty to the Funke Akindele-hemmed Your Excellency. You decry the pivot from bougie to street as fake and hypocritical.
Then in 2022, Death and the King’s Horseman arrives. Your Yoruba friends hail it as the best thing since sliced bread. You tell them it’s a bad, talky adaptation. They tell you it touched their Yoruba sensibilities, but you don’t get it. You never do.
Since the BAM tribe doesn’t survive this sweep, Femi Adebayo closes the gap with Ageshinkole that same year. He’ll later make an iron statement with Jagun Jagun, then proceed to knock on Seven Doors. Your friends will call him the hero of indigenous stories. Your thoughts? He’s a Spielberg knockoff. By 2024, BAP will fully have evolved from the sophisticated Bling Lagosians to the crude, epic House of Ga’a.
It’s a new age. Filmmakers are awake to the fact that Nigerian audiences don’t play hard to get, except what you’re offering is a Chief Daddy 2 or a Merrymen 3 — that, they will not tolerate.
Give them grass-roots, just enough suffering, and sufficient comedy; stuff they can relate to. They don’t mind the poor man dying in the end, as long as the rich, evil guy pays for his crimes a la Blood Vessel, or A Tribe Called Judah.
The average Nigerian movie-goer or watcher understands the above, but for all your over-education, you don’t.
You, the Nigerian film critic, don’t inhabit the same intellectual space as the average viewer. Are you out of touch with the market you belong to, or are you playing hard to get?
You take refuge in the pseudo-intellectual babble on Twitter (still Twitter, ‘cos what in the world is X?). This is where your coven of enlightened fellows convenes. They whine about the sordid tastes of Nigerian moviegoers. The extremists call them idiots. The moderates say they’re ignorant. One unpopular opinion goes: ‘If you don’t like it, then you are not the target audience for the movie, move on.’
You’re pissed at the last statement. You think of a comeback line: You all should be thanking ‘us’ for saving Nollywood from mediocrity.
No, too harsh. You type, instead:
We’re trying to get ‘the people’ to call for higher standards.
‘It’s just a movie, e no pass like dat,’ is Unpopular Opinion’s final word and it haunts you before sleep finds you at night.
Is film criticism all about nitpicking, really? Is your personal satisfaction the standard for what makes a good movie? You confess to yourself that you don’t like CJ Obasi’s Mami Wata. You wouldn’t dare admit this before your enlightened cohort, for fear of being shamed as an untrue cinephile.
Well, as far as you’re concerned, one person stared at the river for endless hours in the film; that’s all that happened because you slept soundly for the rest of its runtime.
You question your purpose as a critic. Maybe your final destination is building a movie promotions business like Roger Ebert, but you’re not much of a businesswoman.
In your search for purpose, you discover something: Nollywood runs on trial-and-error, and excellence is mostly determined by who foots the bill, not what the critics have to say. If this is the case, then Nollywood doesn’t need saving, at least not from you. How did you not know this?!
You decide you’ll change your ways. You’ll be more accommodating to your friends watching Lisabi for the 100th time, even though you have told them it’s a poor copy of House of Ga’a, which you suffered through. You promise to turn off your critiquing antenna when watching Christmas in Lagos so you can laugh with your family members who can’t wait for its release, but criticism don enta your blood. You finally watch Christmas in Lagos, and surprise, surpraizzzzz — you love it! You love it too much for your own comfort. So you watch it again and you’re too happy with it to nitpick.
Then Future Boyfriend posts a Twitter thread and there it is – it’s too musical to be a movie; and too much of a movie to be a musical. And you were secretly hoping he would say good things. You’re not that sure this critiquing thing is in your blood.
Your original thoughts on the movie have been infected, spoiled in fact. You do not know what to do.
The actual people for whom the movie was made will be posting clips from it on their WhatsApp and Insta ad nauseam. When they are tired, they will move on to Omoni Oboli’s YouTube page and comment on Odogwu Pararan’s love tactics.
You’ll be on Twitter, where I know you’ll be, having big grammar conversations with Future Boyfriend, who’s now a senior critic in the industry, and is more out of touch than you because he’ll be writing about Nigerian movies from the UK, or from a writing programme at NYU.
He’ll cry wolf at the rank tastes of Nigerian audiences, and you’ll agree. Your tone will be high-handed because it’s between two misunderstood intellectuals who know too much about talking about the craft and little about the market. He’s not just playing hard to get; he suffers a severe case of Messiah Complex, and you did too, but now, you know better. You also know better than to say yes if he ever asks you to date him because who wants to date a Messiah?!?
While you’re at it, the producer who must be obeyed will organise another meet and greet at the screening of her next blockbuster and the people with “rank” tastes will be putting their money, not where the perfect movie is, not necessarily where their mouth is, but where a movie made for them and by them is.
Hope Osatare Matthew is a screenwriter-in-retirement turned film criticism dabbler. She’s also a fellow with the In Nollywood Film Fellowship, a thing she joined to sharpen her skills in critiquing film criticism itself. Twitter username: Lighthouse_3416.
