Forgetting June

I won’t deny that I was semi-excited about this movie when I originally heard of it. Why? Because even though I know better, a part of me still equates seeing Majid Michel’s face on a cast line-up with a guarantee for excellence and entertainment. I was wrong.

This is no indictment on him as an actor (because I know actors too must chop one way or the other). The fact is that no matter how well Majid acted in this movie, his performance alone cannot elevate it from the subpar concoction of  unoriginal ideas that it is to a marvelous piece of art. The fact is that much of Nollywood is simply selling pretty faces because much of Nollywood is still buying movies for faces (and note that the word ‘much’ connotes only a section).

The movie ‘Forgetting June’ tells the story of a supposedly lovely couple with a love made for the ages, played by Majid and Mbong. The role requires them to be cute, lovable, adorable, it requires the audience to fall in love with them so that when tragedy eventually strikes, as is inevitable with a title like Forgetting June, the audience feels sympathy for them. That was the ideal, in reality however, I couldn’t wait for the inevitable to happen. In fact, I was kind of counting down the minutes until Mbong Amata’s character left the scene.

And again this is not an indictment on the character as it was originally imagined, but by the performance that Ms. Amata was giving. It was so bad that I was ready for her character to be killed off being fully aware that considering the cast line-up (plus the lack of originality of the script writers) she would be replaced with Beverly Naya. I never thought the day would come that I would be looking forward to seeing Ms. Naya in continous screen time.

The beautiful thing about realizing that fresh pepper is actually worse than tatasi (red bell pepper), is that you begin to think of ways in which tatasi could improve. In reality, maybe Ms. Naya’s acting would be more tolerable if she’d act with her body instead of just standing there and making gestures.

Asides from the fact that the movie follows a generally predictable path and uses actresses that are incapable of soliciting emotions from the audience, it also does quite a terrible job with music. The music in the movie at times seems like it is just overlaid as opposed to being integrated into the movie. Therefore scenes that required the right music to bring out emotions were either empty or had the wrong type of music playing over.

The cinematography is generally weak but even worse than that are the dialogues. Not only am I tired of seeing the same old movie over and over again every year with different actors, I’m also tired of listening to the same lines over and over again. The beautiful thing about words is you can say the same thing in a million ways, so please to crafting because there are more ways to toast a babe than the way it was done in “Nneka the Pretty Serpent”.

One thing that kept me going after the first 5 minutes when I eventually accepted that this movie would be a tremendous waste of time was getting my first glimpse of Blossom Chuks. Unfortunately however, even after watching the entire thing I’m still back to square one. He plays a very minimal role in this movie unfortunately, and even at that… well, he needs to put on more fabric for us to be able to concentrate on his performance lol (I guess, I’ll just have to wait until I see ‘flower girl’).

There was a comment under this movie on irokotv.com that describes this movie perfectly in one expression. And having sat through the entire one hour and forty something minutes of this vacuous space called a movie, I am going to have to employ the same sentiments. Therefore, “mschew”.