by Uche Omar

 

If you watch Nigerian movies often, you may have noticed that the consistency of certain themes that do not hold water in reality.

But why do I sweat it? TV reality sometimes is not real life reality. But when a certain storyline is repeated endlessly, the need to question such notion arises.

Here are some of those themes:

Men’s sexual wills are as weak as over-cooked pasta.

Many scriptwriters want us to believe that each time a woman with ample colletage parks it on a man’s table or bares it on his face, in that instance he forgets everything he is, including his name and even his next line in the script and follows the woman like a drooling dog on heat. What could be more untrue. This notion is far divorced from reality. Not all men are dogs.

 

The way to a every man’s heart is his belly.

Seriously? In this age and time? So movie-makers want to have us believe that why many men drive their wives away and live happily ever after with the help from the village is because the help makes better meals. Indeed! Culinary skills are very important, I agree. But a man would still misbehave if he wants to, no matter good a cook the wife is. I remember this tweet by Mike Mudrock: “A dog who wants to bark will bark and a million seminars will not stop him.”

 

Every setback is orchestrated by witches in your village.

And this should set you on a quest for spiritual journey down to your village where you’d need to hunt the witch down which unfortunately may be your beloved grandmother. Wake up people.

 

Bad things don’t happen to good people

So the errant daughter and the prodigal son are punishments to the mother who was a runs girl in 1970 and the father who was a cultist in his hay days; the cancer came because of the abortion that happened in 1980… (oh, those ill-conceived flashbacks!). Sometimes life happens. These things in reality most times have no cause or effect. They just happen.

We can only hope that more reality-based movies would be made come 2015.