I rant a lot about the Ghanaian movie industry and I am indubitably aware of this. It is mind sickening to witness a flamboyant industry trenching down without any robust efforts by most of the industry players to rejuvenate it.
Certainly, some of us have an entrenched “Hope” for the industry to come out of its poignant lack of creative mannerism, the sole killer of a young but vibrant movie industry, the very reason why I do not stop ranting.
Over the last few years, I have developed a thick skin to buying or paying for Ghanaian movies, a practice which was brought to me by my repeated disappointments in the various movies I purchased.
It became as if I was throwing my hard earned cash into the bin. I got bored of my “handsome” idea to have a library of African movies; especially those from Ghana since almost every movie I bought seem to have been made by the same director though in reality, they came from their minds.
Maybe all Ghanaian movie story tellers have been eating the same food, hence thinking along the same lines and substance.
The fact that I was throwing away all the Ghanaian VCDs that I purchased struck my mind to find different ways of spending less on such crap movies. The sad thing with movies is that, when you buy them and they turn out not to be what you expected, you can not return them.
Apart from the money I was throwing away, my little storage in my flat was full of worthless “look alike” Ghanaian movies, preferably, a law student like me would need that space to keep his law books.
This pushed me to finding alternative mechanisms to watch these movies for free ( I am not asking you to result to this, but if you are wasting much money and constantly being disappointment without directors being ready to redeem this, then you can follow my style)
Like a little fire which started its radiance from “Pokuase”, our movie markets were saturated with uncountable Royalty storylines, from “Princess Tyra” via the“King Is Mine” to “ The Prince’s Bride”.
Apart from the common Royalty titles and storylines of the then movies, that era and the movies were massively characterized by Shakespearean language. It made some of us wonder if indeed, people speak like the way the directors were seeking to portray in the movies.
A line of Shakespeare nature which I can vividly remember is from Princess Tyra “where thunder and lighting strikes, birds don’t fly”.(wow, I am impressed, hell No, It gets on my nerves).
Soon, the Ghanaian movie viewing population became tired of all the proverbial talks that came with the Royalty films and the storylines, some of us made our discontentment known by writing about the “follow follow” culture of our movie directors.
These together with other factors lead to the extinction of Royalty Storylines, we thought we have won the battle against “follow follow” and the extensive lack of uniqueness in our movie industry, little did we know we were being moved to another mass era of Soft porn, sex centred storylines.(From frying pan to fire…)
What we have in our markets today is a pollution of sex centred storylines; almost all the directors are doing it, towing the same line, another revolution of “follow follow”. The movie titles have switched from “ The Royal Battle” to “Turn Me On”, “Hot Fork”, “4Play”, “Adults Only”, “Kiss Me If You Can”, etc. This concept of “follow follow” will surely collapse our movie industry if not addressed.
Anyway, until some of us see movies that will give us a value for our hard earned cash, we will continue to boycott purchasing and dwell on freebies.
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