I haven't written here in quite a while, primarily because I've been writing elsewhere (putting my proverbial pen to pages that actually pay). It seems that I always get back here when I'm awfully provoked by an event about which I desperately need to bitch and have no one to vent to. So I blog.
The latest little irritation was a movie I saw last night: "Dukkan Shehata" by Khaled Yousef. It was his usual: All the problems that have ever happened in Egypt, particularly within the last 2 years, jammed unnecessarily in a shallow story filled with characters that somehow refuse to develop or learn from their mistakes. Mind you, I wasn't exactly expecting cinematic brilliance when I decided to watch it. From the writer of movies such as "Khiaana mashro3a", "Ouija", "Al Akhar" and director of "Heya Fawda", one can barely expect a heightened sense of mediocrity from Khaled Yousef.
It was more irritation than disappointment. The irritation of an itch placed somewhere just a scratch away from your most extended reach.
The first half hour was quick and somewhat painless. It was actually alright: funny, upbeat and somewhat engaging. Mahmoud Hemeda did a good performance as a kind and loving yet firm father, but nothing to write home about. Hemeda's acting abilities far surpass anything he has exhibited in this movie, so his ho hum performance here is best attributed to either a shallow script or linear directing. Or both.
Two actors whose performances were brilliant were Amr Abdel Geleel and Ghada Abdel Razek. They did a fantastic job of portraying their otherwise fairly limited characters. Of both, it was Amr Adel Geleel who pretty much carried the movie through, providing absurd moments of comic relief throughout the dreary two and some hours of the Khaled Yousef's drama-queen drama. He performed exactly the same function in Yousef's equally melodramatic gatna-neela-fi-7azena-el-hibab production "7een Maysara", and anyone who has seen that would perceive Amr Abdel Geleel's performance as an alarming deja vu.
Enter the lead hero, Khaled Yousef's muse and Shehata himself: Amr Saeed. He can act, but just barely. The myriad of monologues and abundance of I-can-see-up-his-nostrils close ups that have been laid out in this movie as a tempting canvas for his thespian skills is almost excessive. Yet he didn't quite wow anyone with his performance. He was very predictable. And no, it was not part of his kind-hearted & forgiving character; it was simply shallow acting. He had, to be honest, a few moments where he eerily looked and sounded like Ahmed Zaky- a huge accomplishment in itself, whether or not it was intentional on his part- but sadly they weren't enough to leave any memory of his character or his skills.
Uncharacteristically, I have left the worst for last. Haifa Wahbi, the reason why many people even bothered to go to the movie to begin with, was simply exhausting. In the first and most bearable half hour of the movie, she was passable, pulling off the oblivious sex kitten attitude we have become so accustomed to in her music videos. She was, it needs to be said, not vulgar nor obnoxious in these first scenes, but rather somewhat cute. Cute with a "ق".
However for the remaining part of the movie, watching Haifa Wahbi act, cry and wail was akin to having paper cuts systematically sliced into your eyeballs. Her attempts at drama were a bizarre mixture of epileptic seizures and her performance in her "Boos el wawa" video. There was a lot of unnecessary whining and unsexy moaning in her every single utterance that one could only just hold back barely digested Casper & Gambini lunch eaten an hour earlier. It was so awful that it was funny. One would think that if she had intentionally tried to act badly she wouldn't have done it so well. It was terrific.
This disaster of a movie, this shallowness masquerading in the shape of deep social/political commentary of a drama, leads us to ask one solid question. What was it exactly, that scarred Khaled Yousef so much? Was it a disturbed childhood? Prison? Working as Yousef Chahine's underdog? Sodomy? His bleak, dark & simply terrible perception of his society is awfully annoying & whiny. It's not completely realistic either. He has, with the most naive of direction, stuffed every possible negative aspect of living in Egypt into a 2 hour monster of a production and not one single positive note. Not one. Reality is not that awful, it's his mind that is.
So I suggest that a capable person out there create a spoof of Khaled Yousef's shindigs to expose the ridiculousness of his work. It'd be a shame to not publicly piss on the work of a man who takes his warped vision so terribly seriously. If that's too much of a hassle, how about we send him a package of anti-depression pills? Maybe some upbeat drugs like E pills or at least a handful of pot? Something, anything, to get his head out of his ass.
If this were a proper review of the movie, I'd advise to whoever had enough free time to read this, to not see this movie. If at least not to encourage Khalid Yousef to slap us with another one next year. There are a ton of terrible points (art direction, excessive violence, terrible costumes, irregular editing-to name a few) that I haven't mentioned here. Yet if you are curious to watch it for yourself, then focus on Haifa Wahbi's performance and grant yourself a laugh or two in the midst of all the wailing drama. May God be with you.
