So there’s a movie premiere this Saturday evening, at the Hilton. The movie is called Spilled, and I hear it is going to be a great movie. The cast is great, the director was good, the script was nice and the editing wasn’t half bad. So the movie organising people decided to have a launch at the Hilton, in conjunction with the BOGOF (Being Only Greatest of Finesse, I think). It’s going to be all that, and a bag of fried potatoes. That’s that.
No, wait; there might be more.
Ever since Carbon based life forms have walked on this earth there has been a need for basic entertainment. I would imagine the first
cavemen, used to enjoy watching each other bash animals on the heads with their clubs. More accessible examples though would be the Romans and their coliseums, Shakespeare and his masquerades and Plato, with his thinking. Human beings have always had this need to laugh, and be happy.
Heck, there’s big business in entertainment now. Hollywood is churning out movies that gross into the billions of dollars every year. Movie stars are worshipped. The ground upon which they walk is treated like it was blessed by some higher being.
Here in Kenya though, we see a slightly different story. Whereas we have all these budding movies, and movie makers, no one seems to be tracking their money. In fact, from where I’m standing, it doesn’t seem like there’s really any real money in movie making. Nairobi Half Life was a sensation, in my books the guy who did that should be somewhere on a yacht now, sipping an expensive drink and counting his toes. And that is a major problem for me.
Daystar, Multimedia and the like seem to be churning out more graduates in the creative field than the creative field can hold. We are churning out people for film, faster than we are churning out corrupt politicians. These people should be able to make some sort of contribution to our Gross Domestic Product; instead they are struggling to make ends meet. Probably working in some large mainstream media house, writing half baked news stories about Ruto’s pickled eggs.
But we can’t blame the government for that. Dear me, no. We can’t. I mean, we can, but what good is that going to do us? Even the government doesn’t know who the government is. The only people we can squarely lay the blame on is ourselves. We seem to abhor local television. Scratch television, we seem to hate anything locally made. Claiming the quality isn’t up to par.
Yes, there is a great deal of trash out there, but guess what. I bet there’s trash everywhere. Anyone telling you to watch something just because it’s local is definitely serving you a large plate of heifer droppings. That being said, refusing to look at something, just because it’s local, is a bunch of BS as well.