The final ONLINE contest of the on-going Trophy Extra Special Band Battle witnessed a night of rhythmic and musical artistry over the weekend, as six contestants slugged it out for the top spot.
Trophy Extra Special Stout Live Band Battle competition is an initiative of International Breweries Plc, makers of NEW Trophy Stout, made with extra special roasted malted barley.
The musical contest is aimed at recognizing and showcasing the wonderful sounds of live bands in Nigeria even in these times. The CoVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated lockdowns and restriction of movement in most parts of the world, including Nigeria, has forced the halt of social gatherings where live bands usually perform, posing a risk to the continuity of these creative business. To inspire and reward live band musicians, the Trophy extra special live band battle was born, an online contest to showcase these talent and reward top performers.
The stiff contest received over 200 entries online with Bands and hopeful giving their best rendition of Tubaba’s hit. An initial 15 bands proceeded to the next round which led to a voting stage online where 5 bands emerged got the nod of online viewers based on vocal prowess, entertainment value, and votes garnered, TuBaba picked the 6th band through a wild card option.
The top six finalists are Yoyi Ovi, Black Tunes Band, All Time Band, Genial Sound, The Band Hitz, and Sound Minds.
They will be rewarded with cash gifts and other exciting prizes; the eventual winner of the competition will receive a cash prize of N350,000 and an opportunity to perform at various Trophy Extra Special Stout Brand’s functions when social gatherings restart safely.
The first runner-up will get N250,000 and the second runner-up will go away with N150,000. The last three contenders will receive cash consolation prizes.
Comedian, Funny Bone and actor, Annie Idibia will host the top six’ live performance while TuBaba and internationally-acclaimed comedian, Basketmouth will serve as the live studio judges.
Marketing Manager, Trophy, Bamise Oyegbami expressed satisfaction at the quality of musical talents the competition has unearthed so far. He reiterated Trophy Stout’s resolve to continue to support and celebrate extra special occasions and moments with its teeming consumers.
In line with its commitment to building great brands that stand the test of time, global beverage company, International Breweries Plc has been at the forefront of shedding the spotlight on musical bands in the country.”
For now, it’s up to the viewers to get behind their favourites and choose their winning acts through a voting process that will see a band emerge as the Trophy Extra Special Band. The finale will be streamed live on Friday, July 3rd at 7 pm on @TrophyStout & MTVBase Youtube pages as well as TuBaba & MTVBase Instagram pages while the live voting will be on @TrophyStout Instagram page. Repeat broadcasts will air on TV stations like MTVbase TVC, STV among others afterwards.
Around the start of the 2010s, Nollywood trailers got an upgrade, which meant no more “51 Iweka road onitsha! Grab ya copy nooooow!” It was refreshing. It seemed like the movie industry had picked up a few tips from their foreign counterparts.
However, it’s been years now and nothing has changed. All the trailers now look the same because of certain recurring elements. So if you plan on making a Nollywood-style trailer of your own, here are those recurring elements.
1) Drone/Crane Shots.
ALL THE DRONE/CRANE SHOTS! Throw in many drone/crane shots that makes everyone watching feels nauseous by the end. A quiet conversation at a restaurant? Crane shot. Someone doing laundry? Drone shot. Sex scene? Drone AND crane shot.
2) Make the background music so loud that people struggle to hear what the characters are saying.
Whoever said mood music is supposed to be subtle lied. Take a dramatic song and blare it at the loudest volume possible. Who cares if the viewers aren’t able to hear the bits of dialogue meant to help them understand what the movie is about? WHO CARES??
3) Steamy scenes.
If your movie has sex scenes, put them in the trailer. People have to know that you were willing to “go there.” Remember that Omotola movie from 2017 titled “Alter Ego?” The only reason people remember it is because of the sex scenes (especially the one that took place in the back seat of a car). Don’t dull.
4) Party Scenes
If the Wedding Party and Chief Daddy movies have taught us anything is that Nigerians will lose their minds if you throw any film at them with a big, flashy party in it. If your movie has this, put shots from it into the trailer. Be sure to show off the cast members in pretty clothes trying (and failing) to replicate popular dance moves.
5) Make the entire trailer one long sequence of rapid cuts.
Your trailer has to feel like a jigsaw puzzle. Have so many rapid cuts that viewers will be crazy dizzy by the time the trailer is over and will have no idea what the hell they just watched. People will flock to watch your movie because everyone loves a good mystery.
1) How all the players scramble to pick the cool tokens.
“You’re a shoe. LMAO”
2) When you manage to buy all the utilities.
“Pay me those bills, baby.”
3) When you’re the first person to build a house.
“I have arrived.”
4) When you’re the first to build a hotel.
Now is the time to serve Donald Trump realness.
5) When you’re busy building houses left and right then you pick a chance card that tells you to pay for general repairs on all your properties.
“What manner of bad luck is this??”
6) When you’re broke as shit but excited because you’re about to pass GO and collect $200 but then you pick a chance card that says, “Go straight to jail and do not collect $200 if you pass GO”.
“Did this have to happen right now??”
7) When you’re broke as hell and end up in jail so you just sit there and don’t even bother trying to get out.
Because all the houses have been bought and the entire board is a minefield at this point.
8) When you land on someone’s hotel, mortgage all your houses, and STILL can’t afford to pay the rent.
“Is this the end of the road?”
9) How you look at the richest person in the game:
“I will fuck this guy up.”
10) How the game usually ends:
Followed immediately by the destruction of friendships.
Don’t even give me that. We all knew this day would come. Someone had to say it. Pretend that the title of this is “4 Lagos Restaurants With The Best Aesthetics” or whatever.
1) Tea Room
That old school Volkswagen covered in and surrounded by flowers has been through a lot. It has been the background for thousands of pictures on social media. It needs to start getting credit in captions.
2) Mykonos on the Roof
Mykonos on the Roof was designed to look like all those pictures of Santorini and Mykonos you see on Twitter. Unfortunately for them, that’s the only thing people go there for: To stage full-on photoshoots (complete with outfit changes) after buying 1 bottle of water.
3) Hardrock Cafe
You guys, if the sign in the picture above could talk, it would scream and beg to be put out of its misery.
4) Nok by Alara
Those walls. Ugh. Those walls are the perfect background for a far-out Instagram picture with some caption about how whoever is reading it should break up with their boyfriend because the individual in the picture is bored.
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I once read a novel named ‘Gbomo Gbomo’. It told the story of a little girl who is kidnapped by ritualists and manages to escape. The novel’s last chapter talked about how arresting that particular group didn’t do much to stop the menace of kidnapping. The last line of the book went: “How else do you explain the case of the missing breasts and penis?”
I was 8 years old. And I was scarred for life.
Growing up in Nigeria in the 90s, you definitely heard stories of people having their penises stolen. I was scared shitless at the time. But I’m an adult now and I’ve realized that a lot of things about those stories didn’t add up. Things like:
1) How does one steal a penis?
Magic? A knife? A magic knife? Do you have to grab the person’s crotch (à la Michael Jackson) or just touch them? If so, I’m never walking through Ikeja underbridge again.
2) Why would one steal a penis?
Look, I get why one would steal a penis. This question is directed at the whole ritual industry. Why do some rituals require whole humans and others require only genitalia?
3) When a person’s penis has been stolen, what does their naked crotch look like?
Does it leave a gaping hole or smooth skin?
4) How would the person’s body function after that?
Does the magic rewire their body so they start peeing out of their mouths? If the person has a wet dream, do they wake up to find semen at the side of their lips?
5) Is it more of a spiritual thing where the person loses their ability to summon erections?
Hay God.
6) If the previous point is true, then how would a person confirm that they’ve gotten their erection-summoning abilities back after the thief claims to have returned it?
Do they have to jerk off in front of everyone under Ikeja bridge as proof?
7) AM I THE ONLY ONE CURIOUS ABOUT THESE THINGS?!
AM I ?????!!!
Watch this week’s episode of Isolation Diary where @grandpabbychuck talks about this same issue.
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1) Be prepared to act as a third parent/unpaid baby sitter without the parental authority or perks.
Cooking, changing diapers, watching your siblings when your parents go off to do fun stuff, etc are your responsibilities.
2) When watching your siblings, make sure they never get in trouble.
Even if there are 5 of them and they’re all running around with the energy of the Tasmanian Devil on Crystal meth.
3) When your siblings inevitably get in trouble, take the blame.
If they accidentally murder someone, better learn to not drop the soap because YOU are going to prison.
4) Be fine with your parents giving your stuff to your siblings (usually without your permission).
Not all hand-me-downs were consensual.
5) Be fine with your parents treating your siblings way better than they treated you.
For example, if your parents hardly ever let you go out when you were little, your siblings’ curfew will be 1 AM…and 12 AM on school nights.
6) Go to university and study a course that your parents can brag with.
“RESPECT ME!”
7) Come back from the university after 4 years with a degree and a romantic partner who’s already in their first trimester.
Or with a kid already. Because your parents want grandchildren and time is of the essence.
8) Get a well-paying job immediately after graduation so you can send money home whenever they want.
Arthritis in your old age is gonna be major due to you carrying your entire family’s finances on your back.
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Pete Edochie has a proverb for every personality. This quiz will show you a match. Try to answer the questions honestly.
Once upon a time, I recapped an insane Christian book that claimed the devil created football as a tool to destroy humanity. The article’s popularity made me turn my recaps into a weekly series named “So You Don’t Have To“, where I find batshit crazy pieces of media (books, movies, etc) and recap them for your pleasure.
Today, I decided to shake things up by recapping a movie instead. For the first movie in the series, I picked the infamous Polish erotic romantic drama film, ‘365 Days’.
This movie was actually released back in February 2020 but didn’t pick up steam until it hit Netflix in June, 4 months later. Then no one allowed me to hear word on the internet because of it. Everywhere I turned, there were people fantasizing about being kidnapped while on vacation by an Italian hunk named Massimo. I was going to ignore it but then I heard that the movie is complete garbage, and my interest was piqued.
The movie starts with a conversation between the leader of an Italian Mafia family and a group of guys looking to sell teenage girls into sex slavery.
Mafia leader’s son, Massimo, is spying on a woman on the beach. Mafia Leader tells his son to stop being a harlot and focus because the business will be his one day. Then they both get shot by someone (some people?) and Mafia leader dies.
5 years pass and we’re introduced to the female protagonist named Laura. Laura comes home after a hard day at work and attempts to bump genitals with her boyfriend, Martin, (who looks like a discount Michael Chiklis) but he rebuffs her advances, citing her weak heart as his reason. She goes to her bedroom and masturbates. At the same time, Massimo is receiving the most dramatic blow job I have ever seen from an air hostess on his private jet. Both scenes are shown to us at the same time.
The reason for this sequence is still unknown.
To celebrate her birthday, Laura goes on vacation to Italy with her asshole boyfriend, Martin, and her friend, Olga. At some point, she runs into Massimo, who asks her if she’s lost and then vanishes. Laura’s asshole boyfriend ignores her and hangs out with his buddies the whole time because he’s an asshole so she confronts him, storms off by herself, and is promptly kidnapped.
She wakes up in a fancy house and comes across a giant painting of her…
…after which Massimo appears in the room and repeats what he said to her the first time they met.
She recognizes him and faints. She wakes up later to find him shoving a block of ice in her mouth to suck on because her heart condition made her body react negatively to the sedative used during the kidnapping.
Whatever, I guess.
He proceeds to tell her how he decided to kidnap her after seeing her at the airport when she landed in Italy. He reveals she’s the woman he was checking out on the beach right before he and his father got shot 5 years prior, and he wants her to be his, giving her 365 days to fall in love with him. He tells her that he won’t touch her without her permission and THEN PROCEEDS TO GRAB HER BOOB in a moment of passion and chokes her whenever she talks back to him. Laura tries to escape while screaming about how she has a boyfriend and Massimo informs her that he’s sent her boyfriend a staged breakup note from her. When she’s like “WTF?!”, he shows her proof of her boyfriend’s infidelity (super clear photos of him sleeping with another woman) and threatens to murder her entire family if she tries to escape again.
All this made me ask:
After this, we’re treated to a montage of Massimo taking Laura shopping. This goes on for like 5 minutes and it’s set to a song obviously performed by Michele Morrone, the actor that plays Massimo.
A lot of nothing happens for a while. She gets the bright idea to start seducing him any chance she gets.
And with anything she gets.
She does this until he snaps and forces her to watch another woman give him head.
This turns her on so much that she seems ready to put out right there and then. But he just tells her to get dressed and get out. They go to a club where Massimo is meeting with a few colleagues to discuss Mafia business stuff but he gets pissed because Laura is wearing a super-revealing dress, which is insane because he’s the one that insisted she come. In an attempt to piss Massimo off even more (a thing she clearly enjoys doing at this point), she flirts and dirty dances with a random guy in the club who turns out to be a member of a rival Mafia family. The guy tries to force himself on Laura and this makes Massimo whip out two guns from his extremely spacious crotch and threaten to shoot up the place. Laura wakes up on a yacht and overhears Mario, Massimi’s adviser, telling him that something wicked this way comes because he shot a guy. She apologizes for what she did and asks if the guy Massimo shot was the guy who groped her the previous night. He says ‘yes’ and she’s horrified but he doesn’t notice because he’s too busy blaming her for shooting the guy’s hands off, RoboCop style.
They get into a huge fight during which Massimo accidentally (and hilariously) knocks her into the water. He jumps in and rescues her. While all this is happening, Massimo’s adviser, who he was having a conversation with before Laura interrupted, just stands there looking like:
Mario didn’t give a shit. LMAO
When she wakes up, she is shocked to hear that Massimo saved her. Massimo thanks God he was nearby to save her before she drowned, even though HE WAS THE ONE WHO KNOCKED HER OFF THE YACHT. Touched by his “act of kindness,” she offers to eat his penis…
…after which they proceed to have sex ALL OVER the yacht.
I chose this screenshot because I know y’all can’t see shit in it.
After bumping genitals, Massimo says he’s taking Laura to a ball and she freaks out because she has nothing to wear. Massimo solves this problem by summoning two fashion gays to dress her.
You know they’re gay because of the flowery/leopard print suits, limp wrists, and insane amounts of eyeliner.
At the ball, they run into a woman named Anna. It’s revealed that Anna was one of Massimo’s booty calls during the years he spent searching for Laura. After trying and failing to get him to date her officially, she swore to kill the person responsible for his inability to reciprocate her feelings. Laura leaves and Massimo chases after to apologize. He promises to never let anyone hurt her and then they have sex in the PUBLIC BATHROOM.
Did somebody say DISGUSTING?!
As soon as they’re done, he tells her that she has to go visit her family in Poland. She starts to protest but remembers that she has no say whatsoever in this disgusting ass relationship and keeps quiet. He proclaims his love for her and promises to join her in Poland soon, leaving her sitting on the sink of a public bathroom.
In this shot, she’s probably wondering why her life is suddenly a discount ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.’
Laura returns to Poland and weeks pass. She reunites with her friend, Olga and explains everything. Olga tells her to stay away from Massimo but Laura says ‘no’ so Olga gives up and suggests they both go to a spa and a night club. Laura runs into her ex-boyfriend, Martin, at the club. Martin follows her home, begging her to take him back. She finds Massimo in her apartment and slaps him for abandoning her for so long. They proceed to have sex in front of a giant open window.
He proposes to her and she accepts on the condition that he doesn’t tell her parents what he does for a living. Laura reveals to Olga that she’s pregnant and Olga tells her not to inform Massimo. Mario (Massimo’s adviser) gets a tip that the rival family (whose member Massimo killed for groping Laura) plans to kill Laura. At that moment, the car Laura is in is shown entering a tunnel but doesn’t come out of the other side. Police cars show up. Massimo finds out what happened from Mario and screams to the sky, even though Laura can’t be dead because the source material for this garbage is a trilogy of books.
But whatever, I guess.
The End
After watching ‘365 Days’, I have to agree with the people who described it as ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ on steroids. Everything about this movie (acting, writing, plot etc) is fucking terrible. It legit took me a week to get through it. That’s how bad it is. If you haven’t seen this movie already, SAVE YOURSELF!!!
‘My Name Is A-Zed’ is a written series on the popular online platform, The Naked Convos (TNC). It tells the story of a university student named Azeez who, in an attempt to make enough money to take care of his mother, begins moonlighting as a cab driver in Lagos and gets caught up in the dangerous world of Lagos nightlife.
After reading the series, here are 5 things we love about ‘My Name Is A-Zed‘.
1) The Protagonist:
Azeez (later nicknamed A-Zed) is super easy to root for. He’s a broke university student hustling and trying to make money so he can pay the hospital bills for his sick mother. Those are struggles almost everyone can relate to.
2) The details:
The show is set in Lagos and doesn’t just leave information about things like locations up to the imagination of the readers/listeners. In the first episode, Azeez drives all the way from Yaba to Badore, Ajah and the level of details given about the journey is almost Tolkien-esque.
3) The peek into politics:
Azeez gets caught up in the world of shady politicians and through his eyes, we get a glimpse at the inside workings of politics at the local government level, which is something many people aren’t familiar with.
4) All the twists and turns:
Plot twists are usually stressful to observe unfold because a lot of the time, they’re not done right. But the writers of ‘My Name is A-Zed’ nail it just right. Every revelation made will make you go “No way!” as opposed to “Wow. This is garbage.”
5) It’s being adapted into a web series!
Given the success the series has had in every format it has existed in (written web series and fiction podcast), the news of it being adapted for the small screen came as no surprise. We know that a lot of book to TV adaptations don’t get it right. But we’ve seen the first episode of ‘My Name is -Zed’ and believe us when we say that the show does justice to its source material.
The first episode of the show was released yesterday (25th of June 2020). Check out the trailer and the first episode below:
