#LetsTalk – Do Nollywood Movie Watchers Actually Read Reviews?

Please disregard the fact that this review is being published on a movie review site and attempt to take the message at face value. This is not an attempt to bash any nollywood critic or all nollywood critics because there exists some amazing people doing great work.

Written from one movie lover to other movie lovers.

Joining my list of fundamental questions about the Nigerian entertainment audience (you know, alongside the never ending question of whether or not there’s any hope for movies outside the comedy genre in our box office) is this one.

I recently read a long stretched out ‘epistle’ of a movie review on the “interwebs” about one of our nollywood productions and this review was written by a fellow Nigerian. I could barely make it halfway and, wondering if I was the one with the fatal flaw, I decided to go to the comments and see how my fellow ‘interweb-ians’ were faring.

Amongst the many comments chiding the critic for being too lengthy and verbose, sat one especially glaring comment which stated in more or less words that the readers were lazy and this is “how things are done on sites like THR, Variety, Indiewire and the sorts”.

If you know anything about me then you already know what I did next. I immediately opened up a new tab and went to said sites to read reviews and I’ll tell you what I found – readable reviews.

The reviews were never as long as a chapter in a book (a phenomenon that I find time and time again with many a nollywood movie criticism) and words were always used in a manner where the average viewer can read and comprehend a sentence without pausing at multiple words to check the meaning.

To be honest, after reading so many of these reviews the next question in my mind was “if this is what reviews are then do Nigerians even read reviews?”. Before I posited the question to others, I decided to ask myself the same question.

Personally, I love movies and love Nigerian movies. I also love to know what movie is good and which movie is entertaining, I like to know what works in a movie and what doesn’t (sometimes before I even watch the movie), and after I watch a movie, I like to have a conversation about the movie with other fairly-reasonable nollywood movie lovers.

However, if this is the standard, then I guess I don’t read reviews. I can’t be interested in what works and what doesn’t when the manner in which the information is provided is the interweb-ian version of a thesis paper.

I’m not going to end this one with a final statement or declaration of what is right/wrong or true/false, but instead a question. I understand that different seeds thrive on different soil but…