Heroes & Zeroes

There was a phase in my life where I would blatantly refuse to watch the Oscars-type movies. You know the kind, they are highly celebrated (mostly by “intellectuals”), they don’t show at AMC or Silverbird you have to go to a “Film Festival” to watch them. The reason why I avoided them back then was that no matter how much I loved the movie or thought I understood it, I always still felt like I did not completely understand it because clearly the movie is more ‘intellectual’ than us lay men. And I sort of got that feeling about “Heroes & Zeroes”.

So in order to review this movie, I decided to look past the ‘intellectual’ aspect and just talk about this movie for what it is and what we saw.

Heroes & Zeroes tells the story of a once great Nigerian movie filmmaker (because, woe betide you you refer to him as a nollywood director) who seems bent on the path of self destruction. He finds himself living in the slums when eight years ago he was highly celebrated. He has lost his son because he didn’t have money for him to get proper healthcare. Why didn’t he have enough money? Because he refuses to do a ‘nollywood’ movie and the little money he has he spends on womanizing.

For eight years, his wife, played by Tina Mba, is the breadwinner who chooses to stay with him (for whatever reason), through his self destruction, his many affairs and even after the loss of her son. She basically drags him into submitting an application for a job directing a big budget movie which he eventually gets. However, his desire to bring his own self down holds through till the end.

The beauty of this movie is that the character’s deprecation is not presented in the run of the mill method. He is not drunk, he is not lazing around in clubs, he is not surrounded by women in every frame. It’s a different kind of uselessnesss. It’s an ‘intellectual’ uselessness (ahah – see me dropping big words) and that’s the beauty of the movie.

The writer did not construct a run-of-the-mill storyline. If we are going to be completely honest, the core of this movie is completely unoriginal (but as I always hold, there’s no such thing as ‘original’ anymore). The movie is simply the story of things falling apart in a once great man’s life where he is the principle motivator of his own downfall (Grammar!).

It’s interesting seeing Bimbo Manuel in this role (in fact it’s almost as interesting as the construction of the deprecation). We are used to seeing a well kempt, always put together, almost always oozingly wealthy Bimbo Manuel. But in the first frames you struggle to accept not only a Bimbo Manuel in the slums but also a Bimbo Manuel who can’t even reason accordingly.

Another beauty of this movie is the performances. We are really surrounded by true gems in every frame that it’s almost unfair to even talk about any without mentioning the other so I won’t. I will however point out Nadia Buari’s character’s performance in the audition that got her the role. Was I the only one who thought that was a terrible performance? The problem with movies like this is you can’t even tell whether the filmmakers realized it was terrible and that was the intention or whether they actually thought it was good.

This was probably one of Nadia’s better performances that we’ve seen but even at that she was still not one of the better performers in the movie.

The directors and writers and every single person involved in the thoughts and works that went into making this movie are the highlights of the film. But as far as enjoyability, entertainment and re-watchability go… I guess as Amos Fele would say “this is not a nollywood movie”.