Gift of Pains

-Originality: [2 out of 5] I like the sickle cell/sickler child addition to the story… it was different and helped the movie stand out from similar ones (i.e Days of Gloom). The only other movie that I’ve seen that makes mention of the whole AS-AS marriage phenomena was “Loosing You” starring Van Vicker and Tonto Dikeh. Except from that, I have a vague recollection of some very old movie starring Stella Damasus (I think) in which her daughter was a sickler and (I might be bullshitting here) I think, Bob Manuel was her husband/ex-husband in that movie…? So yeah, all in all this movie was fairly original except when it starts going down the stairwell of a series-of-extremely-sad-events-immediately-following-each-other that would only happen in Nollywood movies (cos I honestly hope things like that don’t really happen in real people’s lives at least not back to back to back like that)

-Predictability: [0 out of 5] Like I mentioned before, this movie just goes down the stairwell of sadness. 

-Directing/Editing: [2 out of 5] I thought it was a job fairly well done… I can’t rate higher than a 3 on that because I refuse to give any movie that has up to four parts more than a 3 on directing and editing.

-Acting quality: [3 out of 5] One really amazing thing about this movie was the casting. I was overly delighted by the cast and not just that but by the roles they played. Let’s just quickly go through the rounds and you’ll see what I mean. Starting with Chacha! A quick search on the “Search by Actor/Actress” bar by the right of my blog for Chacha will show you that she always plays the role of a slut/call girl/campus babe in a good percentage of the movie she played. Hence, the reason that when I saw this movie I thought “oh yeah! somebody’s most definitely sleeping around in this one”. Imagine my shock when I realized that she was not a call girl? Now take that shock and multiply it by 2 and you’ll get the level of shock I was at when I realized that Patience was not an evil witch in this movie. Now take THAT shock and multiply it by two again when I realized that Jibola Dabor was neither a ritualist, a politician, nor an incestuous father in this movie. Kudos to the casting director whoever you are. Regardless of all the noise I just made however, and regardless of how amazing ALL of the aforementioned actors were in their roles, I still retain that the most surprising and definitely stand out performance was by Oma Nnadi who played the role of Ella, the sickler. I have seen her in a couple of movies before, nothing major and nothing interesting but 3 minutes into this movie I was sitting there and raking my brain with “who is this gyal?”. Guest appearance by Joyce Kalu. Uchenna Nnanna was someone else I was pleased to see… in a different role. Walter had an impressive performance and the newbie who played younger brother Richie did an amazing job (not amazing enough for me to want to find out his name but quite impressive for someone I hadn’t seen on screen before).

-Setting: [3 out of 5] On point

-Costume/Make-Up: [3 out of 5] Good especially loved Chacha’s scarves. That tin eh… if to say me I try wear am go out I for look like person way wan begin craze, but when the babe wear am? Effortless

-Video Quality: [2 out of 5] Fair

-Soundtrack: [2 out of 5] The soundtrack sounded a lot like Psalm 121 which vexed me. Not because of the biblical allusion but because they should have used a really sad song like Ken Erics ‘Inozikwa ome‘ for Heart of a Saint. All the songs that were used (Elton John’s “Sacrifice” & Wizkid’s “Love my Baby”) were not attributed at the end

-Musical Score: [1 out of 5] I felt it could have been better. If it was then maybe I might have been tempted to cry or something