Movie Review – The Wedding Party 2 Written by Oluwamuyiwa ‘Lulu’ Olaoluwa

For Your Consideration: The Wedding Party 2
Beware!! spoilers boku here pass landmine for abandoned Russian minefield.

This time last year, Nigerians both home and abroad were held spellbound by the cinematographic and comedic wonder that is The Wedding Party. When the trailer hit our cyberspace early last year, I was giddy with excitement and l wanted to watch it so bad. I don’t think I have ever been that excited to watch a Nigerian movie ever.

When those who were fortunate to be in Canada for the Toronto International Film Festival to watch the flick, among other Nigerian contenders, filled our Instagram and twitter with outstanding reviews and beautiful critiques, I was quite anxious t see this myself.
Come December, I went…..I watched…..I laughed my butt off.

It was everything and more. They took a seemingly simple plot and turned it to gold. With amazing performances from Nollywood greats, the movie had me spending cash to watch it 4 times till that fellow leaked it online then I downloaded it to my laptop.
What?? you thought I would ignore it because I’m against piracy? Biko, I have spent 8k already to see the movie, Aunty Kemi and Mo can handle it.

With the roaring success of the first instalment and a staggering 480 million Naira in the box office, making it the highest grossing Nigerian movie ever, it was no surprise that they would do part 2. Of course, I was going to watch it and that I did.
Part 2 was amazing to watch

However……..I have questions.
1) Why was there no build up in respect to Deirdre and Nonso’s relationship?
2) I know its been a while I’ve been to a fancy restaurant but when you sit down, aren’t you supposed to be presented with a menu and not a full course meal?
3) Did the Cokers loose their home? Because it seems they were with the Onwukas all the time like MTN.
4) Did Rose aka Beverly Naya aka Dozie’s (Banky W) former girlfriend aka home wrecker travel all the way to Dubai just to ruin a wedding and a marriage or its just coincidence?
5) What the hell was Harrison (Frank Donga) doing in Dubai?
6) Why was there a major screen gap between when Dozie told Rose off and Deirdre crying about the fake proposal?

The list goes on, but I think if I continue I might get people vexed.
don’t get me wrong, in spite of the little errors in my book, it was still a viewing pleasure.
Some of my favourite parts would be

– Seeing Wonu (the wedding planner) speak Igbo with Ushbebe
– Patience Ozokwuo in her natural element as the official bad belle in any family situation.
– Seeing Wonu and Iya Micheal reunited again.
– And of course Shola Sobowale. My God!! this woman steadily gives us a fantastic and hilarious performance. Is it when she was boasting of french champagne? Or her throwing down with Patience? Or when she nearly tossed the doctors over the balcony when Dunni was about to deliver? Or the way she kept checking her v jay to see if the baby had arrived? I just couldn’t get enough of Shola.

Despite being a comedy, we did have some tiny dramatic parts like when Deirdre’s father went nearly racist at their introduction and when Shola was in tears after Uju gave her a crispy cold treatment. Those tensions that are bound to flair up during weddings were not absent and I loved that.
I know a lot have seen this flick and felt it was wack…..to them I say, leave your bad belle in 2017.

I would advise Ebony Films to be subtle with their trailers in the future. The trailer gave away most of the major parts of the movie that you could almost formulate the story just by it alone.
Although I might not spend as much money watching it again like I did the first instalment, I do say that it was a pleasure to have watched and I will consider seeing it again.

I recommend everyone to see it but you can chill till the price comes down to 1k or go to PEFTI Cinema and watch it for 500 Naira.
I give the movie 2.5/5

P:S – Funny thing I noticed was the developing chemistry between Shola and Yemisi….are you people trying to hint at a TWP3?
If na joke, make una stop am real fast……

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Taking a ‘NO’ Like a Champ! – Mfonobong Emerald

All day yesterday, I had to suffer a colleague’s angry glares because she’d asked for a favour and I politely turned her down.
Being someone who’s come a long way from being unable to refuse, even at a great personal cost, I found her reaction very amusing. And it got me thinking.

This seems like a trivial subject until you consider the underlying psychological triggers and long-term effects.
There’s this un tamed sense of entitlement we all struggle with. We expect things from friends, parents, siblings, lovers, bosses, even internet strangers. When we don’t get them, by default, our disappointment transforms into aggravation. Aimed at them.

Next, vindictiveness steps in. We start planning to “do our own back”. Even though it takes a lifetime, payback, I will! Or, we take the high school route and keep malice. Un friend them, both literally and figuratively.
In the long run, we become dysfunctional people who further degenerate into creeps because we can’t handle break-ups. Radio-silence after sending a job application plunges us into depression. An outright “We’re sorry” sends you jumping off Third Mainland Bridge.

Learn to take ‘No’ for an answer. It’s good for your self-esteem.
Better still, understand that nobody owes you an explanation for saying no. Whether it is their refusal to lend you “ordinary 5k”, their inability to “house you for just one week even though they live in 20-room duplex”, or even something as petty as “No, you can’t borrow my pen”, they are within their rights to refuse.

It’s okay to be upset for a minute as long as you suck it up and move on. Move. On. Don’t become a vengeful, object-throwing, red-faced three year old.
Leave off trying to calculate if it’s a fault of yours or selfishness on their part.

P.S: As a bonus, learn to say NO. Please, learn. It’s a sign of strength. But the motivational speakers don’t tell you that.

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FACE OF THE CAVE FOR THE WEEK (Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence)

Stunning looks of the week.
Features: Ifeanyi and Lauretta.

Name: Ifeanyi Ogbo

State: Anambra

Field: Creative writing, corporate writing/modelling/fitness instructor

Likes: Books, films, fitness, people,artsy stuff.
Dislikes: Inequality in every form.

Favourite Quote: “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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Name: Lauretta Amadi

State: Imo

Field: Risk Consultant

Like: Honesty
Dislike: Lies

Favourite Quote: “Nothing can dim the light that shines from within” – Maya Angelou

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Quote For The Week
“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.” – Bob
Marley

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Your Real Name Is Your Surname – Written by Iniobong Leroi Umoh

Nobody really cares about your first name or nickname.
You are not successful until you join the elite league of men and women who are addressed all over the world by their surnames.
The moment you achieve a great feat, hold a foremost office or position in society, become famous etc, your first name pales into insignificance.

President Barrack Obama became the President of the United States of America and his Kenyan surname ‘Obama’ became the most powerful name in the world for 8 years. Many people do not know that ‘Barrack’ is his first name.
How many Nigerians know that their President’s first name is Muhammadu? Go out on the streets and make a survey, and I can bet you that less than 30% would be able to tell you the President’s first name.

The weighty surname cuts across all fields of human endeavour; sports, politics, arts/entertainment, academics, technology, religion, etc.
Do you know Lionel?
Do you know Messi?
Everybody knows Messi, not everybody knows that ‘Lionel’ is Messi’s first name.
How about Christiano?

Right now there are only five people in this world who address me by my surname. But If I become the President of Nigeria in 2027, everybody will be talking about Umoh. Nobody will mention Iniobong.
Newspaper headlines would read;
“Day of long knives! Umoh reshuffles cabinet, appoints ministers from Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune!”, “Power Drunk! Umoh declares state of emergency in Nigeria! Assumes absolute powers, takes over National assembly and Judiciary! Jails all law makers and Judges!”
“What is wrong with Umoh? Why all these policy somersaults? Is he crazy?”

Take a minute and reflect on your surname. Is it “sexy” enough? If your surname is ‘Ifod’ for instance, if you (If you are not too old) or your child becomes an English premier league footballer, you would have to deal with the consequences of your surname. You don’t want to see your son on the pitch with “Ifod” written on the back of his jersey. If he mistakenly scores an own goal in a crucial match, you won’t like to see screaming headlines like:
“Sabotage! Ifod buries Man Utd! Scores own goal!”
“Ifod has done it again!”
The sports betters and coupon players in the Akwa-Cross axis would point to his name as the cause and rain curses on him for cutting their ticket. They would petition the club to axe him from the team.

So ladies, before you marry that man, scrutinise his surname. Guys, if your surname makes you uncomfortable, go and do a Spiritual Renaming/prayers in a Church or do a change of surname in a newspaper.
If this post doesn’t make any sense to you, please pardon me, it was written under the influence of Amartem Forte.

P.S: There’s also the elite league of first name individuals. We might talk about this group someday.

*Ifod(Ibibio) = Witch(English) or Winsh (pidgin)*

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Book Review: Naked By Ese Ark

Ese Ark’s Naked is a real breath of fresh air, a lens through which we get to see an enhanced view of those murky parts of our lives where we are unconsciously just ambling through, whilst also providing us with fresh feasible real life evidences and solutions.

Ese Ark employs excellent but simple diction in narrating her personal experiences; allowing us a panoramic view into her personal life and family from childhood, broaching in the process, quite a wide range of relevant topics like: family; is it thicker than water? Girls; are they cat fighters? Boys; am I inferior to them? Sex; is it overrated? Religion; my journey to unbelief. Guilt and shame; my public breakdown. Love and marriage; I didn’t marry for love. Therapy; am I crazy? Awareness; from believing to knowing. Purpose; why I’m here…etc.

As she wriggled between the forenamed topics, she tried to connect with us on an intimate level by sprinkling background information and valid evidences where necessary. The book begins with birth (two sides of a mysterious coin) and death (a reminder to love now). She was born on the 29th of March 1984 to a mother, as she was told, who didn’t breastfeed her because she had to go back to school to finish her education, while her little one lived with her grandma. After eighteen years, she finds out that she has a step sister who was born in the same month and year as herself.

The author dissects her own small unit that is family, casting it as a clear prism which allows us a closer look at a distorted social construct imposed by the ‘we vs them’ mentality that comes with being part of a family, race, class, and other societal divisions. She offers a snapshot of the downside of this social divide: today leaders of poor countries are known to send their ‘families’ to better parts of the world while the citizens feel the heat of under-development and decrepit amenities. They think that by protecting the small unit, they are doing enough to protect themselves from the rest of the people. People steal billions of naira and hide these on behalf of their ‘families’ while other citizens starve to death. The fact that you can be unkind to some people because they are not family proves that you are an unkind person, and even your family should be afraid of you, because what if you were not related to them? You would not care if they died of hunger and that is a very scary prospect. She further posits that we can choose our family. We can convert friends to family and still get all the love and security we deserve. By and large, we are all connected. Family is the whole of humanity and the earth is our home. It is our duty to protect our home and each other.

Real and continuous awakening requires a certain level of personal determination, self-awareness and curiosity. Ese Ark rightly did nothing to flippantly douse what lies between sleepwalking through it all and a complete and powerful awakening. On her journey to awareness, she recounts with strict precision, the rigors of it all: “the first time I heard anything about consciousness was when I read Eckhart Tolle’s “Power of Now.” By the end of the book, which took me eight days to finish, I felt I had found something but I didn’t know what it was. I could not articulate it. The book ended with the question, “how do you know you have surrendered?” To which Eckhart replied, “When you no longer need to ask that question.” “At first I thought I completely understood what he talked about. It took me three more years to get the message and bring it to my reality. Prior to when I started living the message, I struggled greatly.”

The author farther takes us expertly through a comprehensive eye-opener—her totter from law school to religion. She found, through her grapples, the fortitude to question that omnipotent halo of religion that is endemic in these parts of the world, infusing us with a salvo of aplomb to try and satiate any misgivings we might have about religion at any time. Her reasoning started with, “why would god choose to save me over the girl on the other side of the planet? I’d always see stories of wars and suffering in the news and I wasn’t feeling so lucky anymore. I believed when I was told that god cared about me and was providing for me but seeing as I prayed for the people who were suffering, I wondered why god didn’t care enough to help them too. One day I asked the ultimate question, “what if this god narrative is a lie?” “What if the pastor wasn’t hearing from god and was just controlling people for the heck of it and his congregation of righteous people were simply submitting themselves to be used and controlled? How else do you explain a parent subjecting their child to torture or death because some spiritual leader claims said child is a witch? How do we explain people strapping on bombs to kill themselves and others because of promises of a better afterlife and sex with virgins? Why are religious people the most judgmental people in any setting?

Subsequently, worthy of note is her dexterous anatomy of pain (the mother wound), festooned with her veracious emotions around the subject: the average Nigerian female has had painful experiences with her mother. This used to confuse me in my relationship with my mother until I found out it wasn’t peculiar to me and there was something I could do about it. In the not-so-distant past, I couldn’t talk about my mother without feeling anger or hate. She went ahead to invoke a few insightful excerpts from Bethany Webster a corroborative tool intent on shining more light on The Mother Wound: when I found Bethany Webster, I learnt about something called The Mother Wound and this was the peak of my understanding and healing. She defines the mother wound as “the pain of being a woman passed down through generations of women in patriarchal cultures. And it includes the dysfunctional coping mechanisms that are used to process that pain.”

The book ends with the inevitable nature of death; our utmost fear and denial of the phenomenon. When it hits not directly at us but just close to home, how do we manage to find appropriate words for the bereaved in that moment? What happens after death? Is there a silver lining? “For me, death therefore serves as a reminder to love now. Death tells me I will not be here with these experiences forever. Along with telling me to love now, death challenges me to live while I am alive. It tells me to write this book, sing my own song, tell my story, love hard, give without expectation, receive freely and never fall to the level of merely existing.”

Ultimately, Naked is a sufficiently equipped treatise that seeks to displace unconscious living. Reflecting that to be vulnerable is to be alive; that it is possible to ask and receive answers; that it is possible to look inward and try to know yourself; that it is okay to acknowledge and let yourself feel, and then come back and grab it all by the scruff of the neck. However, even in trying to enlighten, Naked is assertive just enough not to be aggressively pushy but open and lucid enough to let us exercise our own discretions.

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FACE OF THE CAVE FOR THE WEEK (Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence)

Stunning looks of the week.
Features: Donald and Rose.

Name – Donald Ekenta

State of origin – IMO
State of residence – Abuja

Field – Computer Engineering

Likes – Optimism, adventure,varsity
Dislikes – Pessimism, nonchalance,nagging,myopic mindset

Favourite Quote – “The will to learn is half the learning.”

Contact – Donald Jnr Ekenta |Facebook

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Name – Rose Akpabio

State – Akwa Ibom
Field – Freelance writer

Likes – I like reading novels, writing books, watching epic movies like GOT, Vikings, e.t.c, I love Listening to good music. I love honesty and kindness. I love dogs.

Dislikes – I hate cats. I hate wall geckos. I hats liars and pretenders. I hate watching football.

Favourite Quote – ” As you make your bed, so shall you lie on it”

Contact – Rose Akpabio |Facebook

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Quote For The Week
“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

To qualify for the next Face of the cave series
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*Give a brief description of yourself and please make sure to include your likes, dislikes and hobbies.
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Exposing Our Zero Maintenance Culture – Written by Josh M. Bassey

The last time I repainted my apartment, I had issues with the painter when I insisted he fill up the cracks by the door hinges before painting them. He said it didn’t matter, as that part will be covered by the curtain. I insisted it did matter. Fill before painting it. He grudgingly did.

You see, our shabby attitude to details stares us in the face at every turn: a generator repairer will un-screw five bolts but end up screwing in four, insisting the fifth isn’t necessary, as if the manufacturers were high on cheap weed when they screwed in five; someone will switch on the socket to charge their phone, but care less to switch it off when they un-plug the phone. They just couldn’t be bothered. Again, why?
And until we start taking these tiny bits of details seriously in this parts, it would be harder looking at the bigger picture.

We have a big problem in this country, one that has to do with a lack of attention to detail. You see a palatial residence in Lekki, only to get inside and discover the painter did a shabby work of the painting; the carpenter left half of the door hinges sticking out; the plumber patched up parts of the plumbing work, leaving parts dripping with water and effluent; and the tiler lacked symmetry in the layout of the tiles.
We couldn’t be bothered, after all it doesn’t matter. If it ain’t broke, nobody should bother fixing it, right? Let it be.

Being a perfectionist, I often times watch foreign movies not because I’m a movie buff, but because I love to see their attention to tiny bits of details: the decor in the sitting room, kitchen and toilet; the visual aesthetics that imbue their living spaces; flowers vases, sculptures, lampshades on all corners to improve both interior illumination and aesthetics, ornate ornaments, picture frames adorning dressers, and all sorts of decorative objects.

A typical “bigman” here, once he’s done with constructing the house, he’s done with everything. Furniture and electronics are thrown in haphazardly without symmetry or coordination; a chair here, a badly hung frame there. One central bulb or chandelier overhead. No soft or mood lighting anywhere. Why bother?
Even the jacuzzi in the bathroom will only work for few weeks or months before you start seeing a bucket kept on standby, the toilet cover flung open or even ripped off its hinges.

We have an appalling maintenance culture, and it shows in these little things we take for granted.
You lodge in a hotel, only to discover shabbiness has come to be accepted as the norm. No water heater in the bathroom, the AC is faulty and no one bothers. There’s a stain on the bedsheets, but who cares? Just manage it as it is. After all, you ain’t the first guest to lodge there. If others didn’t complain, why should you?

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FACE OF THE CAVE FOR THE WEEK (Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence)

Stunning looks of the week.
Features: Racheal and Romeo.

Name: Racheal Onomakpo

State: Delta
Business: Wine dealer |CEO Rachies Drink House

Likes: Honesty

Dislikes: Arrogance

Favourite Quote: “Live your life.”

Contact: Racheal Onomakpo |Facebook

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Name: Ani Ansah Romeo

Nationality: Ghanaian

Field: Database Administrator

Likes: Affection, deep conversation, honesty, Smile/laughing, weird clothes, God..

Dislikes: Drugs, rudeness, stupidity, liars, fakeness, negativity.

Favourite Quotes: Many people die at 25 and are not buried until they are 75″

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Quote For The Week
“All labour that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

To qualify for the next Face of the cave series
*Have your profile be a clear face shot.
*Give a brief description of yourself and please make sure to include your likes, dislikes and hobbies.
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Broken Vows

Diary of a Husband Material

With the end of the premier league season, my Saturdays had become a breeding ground for mood swings and tantrums.

I tried to watch any show on my cable TV to keep my mind occupied but none of the programs seemed to pique my interest. I let the remote drop on the floor and soon my eyes roamed around the sitting room till they rested on my wedding picture. The 6 x 6 frame hung imposingly by the corner, intimidating every other wall hanging. I smiled sadly at me in the picture. I felt like I was on top of the world, happy that I was going to spend forever with the woman I loved. That was just a year ago. Looking back, It seemed like a year of betrayal.

As I await the first court hearing in a week’s time, how did I get here? I asked myself.

I…

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