Obama Babes

Friday, 23 July 2010

Winnie (Chika Ike) and Clara (Ify Ejikeme of the Big Brother Nigeria fame) are bankers who fall into bad times. They lose their jobs and calamity seems to be dogging their every step. What can they do? Should they hold out or join the ‘Leading Team‘? as being championed by Kilsi (Uche Jombo) and Barbara (Monalisa Chinda)? With the huge target set by the bank, your guess is as good as mine.

As usual, Nollywood does occultic eerily very well. So well done, that bringing to a satisfactory end becomes almost impossible. Oballa, the god the girls serve, appears to have a free, almost unchecked rein. Neither white garment priests nor the tongue speaking Pentecostal pastor can quite do away with him. There‘s no surprise there. However, the only snag is that this is supposedly a 2010 film and rightly or wrongly I was under the general impression that Nollywood had toned down on the occultic especially when there‘s no big lesson to be learnt. And as if that isn‘t trying enough, the film drags on.

Obama Babes, also called What Babes do and What Babes Want, picks up on the current happenings within the banking sector where beautiful girls are given impossible targets and used as bait to lure rich male customers. But the film fails to pay attention to the small details. Unfortunately, that‘s what I notice especially as the story is not strong enough to distract me. For instance, the bank‘s logo, GBP, even if it‘s a bank conceptualised from my father‘s palm oil farm, is so fake you can almost see the paint coming off. Then for some reason, the producers of the films have a thing about cardiac arrest. It‘s the preferred illness to keep characters out of the way.

What‘s the right way to inform a patient she is HIV positive? The guys who made Obama Babes think it‘s best to do so over the phone: ”Hello Kilsi, you‘ve tested HIV positive”. If that‘s too harsh, how about just casually informing a ‘whole big chief‘ he is HIV positive even before he settles down in the doctor‘s office? And if his wife comes asking, just hand her the result, albeit reluctantly. She‘ll decode immediately and break into a faint or ‘cardiac arrest‘. Is there a special school people in Nollywood are taught how to read HIV test results? Because the only time I undertook an HIV test and was handed the result, it read like Greek to me. There was nothing to show whether it was negative or positive, at least not in plain English.

Obama Babes could have done something really topical about the sexploitation in the banks but opted for the mumbo jumbo of the occultic. The acting and the directing are equally as spooky.