Tag: Fifty

I haven’t seen Mo Abudu’s highly publicised Fifty, but if its first review by a British tabloid is anything to go by, it is yet another unfortunate death sentence of a Nigerian motion picture offering of high budget, plenty noise and undue showmanship.

This sadly reminds one of the ‘failure’ of Half of a Yellow Sun to deliver on both artistic and commercial grounds, such that I pray, even now, that Charlie Bury was merely high on overdose of all dangerous drugs combined, to have described Fifty as lacking in structure and authenticity, and worse still, reducing the latest Nigerian effort to an acting class project. Indeed, Bury must be more intoxicated than the inventor of ‘Shoki’, to have warranted his pen running the race of an imbecile.

But perhaps Bury was merely angered; the kind of anger that turns your bowels when you find charlatans insulting creativity, all in the name of an all-comers affair. I too would be angered by such, and perhaps get more abusive of this landmark effort than the British reporter.

My fury would be for several reasons; one being that the director of Fifty is the same man, Biyi Bandele, who was responsible for the jaundiced Half of a Yellow Sun. How could a film director be said to have failed on two projects back-to-back? No! Bury must be wrong to have likened Fifty to a “TV drama set for release on a channel facing liquidation.”

This is not fair to Abudu’s EbonyLife TV which is fast expanding on content, prepared to match bourgeois spectrum with robust programming when Nigeria eventually switch over to digital television broadcasting. For heaven’s sake, Fifty is supposed to be a film, not some TV soaps, and to say this project even falls short of the standard of a TV drama is like mangling a corpse (Sobs).

“Biyi Bandele is the director in charge of pulling together these sunken sequences,” he says, “the montage and acting both inundated with fever. Performances are consistently colourless, even if the palette and multitude of locations have more to offer. There is some energy to be found in this film, the soundtrack relentless in its pop offerings and offbeat approach to the content, and the premature humour no doubt a joy for a few. There will be an audience for this film, just like there is for many frowzy shows, but this is not something for cinema.” Kai, I need to see this film, gani yafi ji (Seeing is believing).

Musing, this is not the best for Abudu, a hardworking woman who thrives to enrich black Africans through her far-reaching broadcast network. This film, if it is what it is, will only make the west to laugh at us the more.

Bandele, known as a playwright and stage director dabbled into feature film directing with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun which was promoted as a British film at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2013. Notwithstanding, it fell flat before 12 Years a Slave, another movie featuring the same British-Nigerian, Chiwetel Ejiofor, as lead actor. With the same razzmatazz, Fifty, his second feature film was first premiered outside Nigeria.

This time, at the British Film Institute’s London Film Festival, showcasing some of the best of Nigerian actors, whose acting, as directed by Bandele, has also been poorly rated. And talking about Nigeria/British film partnership, Destiny Ekaragha and Bola Agbaje’s film, Gone Too Far, a simple film with OC Ukeje as perhaps the only popular actor, could not be said to have disappointed their funders. Those young girls were simply unassuming.

Perhaps it is too early in the day to ask Biyi Bandele to go back to the stage. When we get the clear picture of Fifty, it will no longer be a musing matter, it will be a straight, frank advice to a brother, just to save us this recurring embarrassment.