Guest Writer: Musings On The Ghana Film Industry, Is It The End Of Progress?

What is it about the Ghanaian Movie Industry today? The executives and powerbrokers (producers) claim to be taking the industry to the next level. I beg to differ, its more like a retrogression. Of late, a fan cannot watch a movie without seeing naked butts, boobs, and some other privates of these actors and actress, and they make it so distasteful when acting a love scene.

Then you ponder over these questions: Is the movie is worth watching? Do you want to send the CD back to the vendor? Or do you simply want to throw up?

The age of family oriented film is dead in Ghana, nowadays; one cannot watch a movie with parents or older people and not feel the tension building in between them. It is even increasingly difficult to boast of the prowess of our master class actors it comes to Majid Michel or John Dumelo. With the latter’s finger inserted in an actress’s privates and the former’s hairy butt naked for the world to see, you dare watch these guys with your family and see the stupid look that will turn up on your face.

Followed by the ladies, it just makes me feel disgusted as a woman to watch them engage in these acts. The insult is even more compounded as some of these actors and actresses are mediocre, when they have a dialogue it’s very clear that they are reading off an overhead or a card board.

It’s so pathetic, because to be an actor and a good actor for that matter, one has to get into character, i.e, making the audience believe in u as the character you are playing, but that is not the case with these actors, they just say words without conveying any meaning. They don’t transcend their emotions to connect to the viewers. And that is what I call BAD acting.

Another issue I have in today’s movies are the use of profanity. Whats up with the F words, the N words and all those demeaning words and phrases the screen-writers place in scripts! It’s so sad because we copy blindly, even the country that we derived all these words from, don’t use them incoherently in their movies like we do.

Like the blind leading the blind, the producers and directors seem to think that they are the “ISH”-acceptable vernacular-terms of the day. These actors also, give off these fake accents, trying to sound American or British, or probably Scandinavian. Furthermore, they speak in this Shakespearean type of language; and it makes fans unable to understand what is being said. Can you screenwriters please stick to the normal modern English language?

Then my last question pops up, what is up with the movie titles? Like Hot Fork, Who Loves Me, etc.? What in the name of titles is Hot Fork, or is it rather Hot F**k?? It’s just getting worse and deteriorated by the day.

Can we ever learn to do things with some credible originality that we can own up to? Allow me to put myself in your shoes, it is clear that until we can be responsible stewards of the Ghana film industry, we will always have to struggle, to give our best productions.

By Edna Nketiah/Guest Writer On GhanaCelebrities.Com