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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Of hype and fluff
By Tarek AtiaIt may already be mid-October, but it's still hot enough for some people to think that winter might be cancelled this year. In any case, the summer season for films and tapes has only just come to a close. It heaved its last sigh as schools went back into session last month, and now it's officially dead.
The season was an eventful one, with competition hotter than it's been in a long time. The all-out wars in both the film and tape markets reflect Egyptian production companies' sudden coming of age regarding the power of marketing. Getting people excited about this year's new and improved model is the essence of big sales -- and this summer producers were spinning hype in a big way.
Even the invites to film premiers seemed to have been collectively pre-arranged. This year we have to do something creative, they all seemed to say. And so you had a mobile of Mohamed Heneidi hanging by a string for Belia wa Demagho Al-Alia (Belia's Big Head), a pop-up window of Alaa Walieddin playing five different characters in Al-Nazer (The Principal) and a pyramid-shaped invite for Omar 2000.
But if the invite style was creative and new, the films themselves, for the most part, were canned. Widely anticipated to be the summer's big hit, Heneidi's Belia, about a mechanic who helps out a bunch of street children and sticks to his roots, was pretty much a disappointment, a re-hash of the comedian's previous roles with scenes and scenarios cut and pasted from Arabic films of yore.
Though the critics dozed, the crowds still loved it, inspiring the question: were people laughing because they felt they had to get what they paid for? If so, we're talking a whopping LE14 million worth of guilt here. Critics have been warning Heneidi that his star will fall even more rapidly than it rose if next year's vehicle turns out to be just as uninspired as Belia. The trouble is, even though it didn't make as much as the producers had hoped, it did do well enough that they might not have learned the lesson.
Former Heneidi teammate Alaa Walieddin showed he could compete with the best of them, and his star vehicle Al-Nazer actually made more (LE15 million) than Belia. Although the story of a high school dropout who ends up being a school principal featured the same pithy, Hollywood-inspired, little-guy-saves-the-day rhetoric, most people said they laughed for real at Alaa's antics. Of course, he was helped immeasurably by the up-and-coming Mohamed Saad, playing everyone's favourite baltagui (tough-guy), El-Limby. It was a clear power-play by producer Magdi El-Hawari to turn Saad into next summer's big star.
Short wa Fanella wa Cap (Shorts, T-Shirt and a Cap), the star debut of another former Heneidi teammate, Ahmed El-Saqqa, also went for the Hollywood approach. This love story set in Sharm Al-Sheikh was a little more sophisticated in terms of plot cohesiveness, but it nonetheless ended up more like a collection of video clips interspersed with brief sketches of mirth. It has the plastic popularity characteristic of films like Top Gun, and has established El-Saqqa as a money-making star, bringing in LE6 million in revenue so far.
The papers would have you think there are dozens of movies in production right now, with nearly everybody who once played a supporting role in a Heneidi film set to become the star of his or her very own flick, currently being filmed. But when will all these movies come out? With the Heneidi-Alaa-El-Saqqa triumvirate set to dominate the scene for at least another summer or two, one wonders whether all these new films will suffer the fate of the half dozen or so that dared to peek their heads out into the crowd this summer.
This summer's winners and losers, clockwise from left: Alaa Walieddin; Mohamed Heneidi; Amr Diab; Mohamed Mounir; Hisham Abbas; Ahmed El-Saqqa
photos: Al-Ahram Weekly archives
Ahmed Adam's Shagee Al-Sima (Movie Star) was doing a decent LE700,000 before it was engulfed by Belia's Big Head, which opened in a record 60 cinemas nationwide. Al-Hob Al-Awal (First Love) also gave it a try right about then, and came away with more than a few crumbs -- a fairly successful LE3 million -- before being swallowed by the big guys.
Box office results,
Summer 2000Al-Nazer (ThePrincipal) LE14,892,040
Belia wa Demagho Al-Alia
(Belia's Big Head) LE13,966,682
Short wa Fanella wa Cap
(Shorts, T-Shirt and a Cap) LE6,036,321
Al-Hob Al-Awal
(First Love) LE2,938,753
Shagee Al-Sima
(Cinema Star) LE729,000
Film Thaqafi (Cultural Film) LE582,353
Abnaa Al-Shaytan
(Devil's Children) LE282,820
Imra'a Taht Al-Moraqaba
(A Woman Under Surveillance) LE 235,327
Omar 2000 LE 130,194
But Omar 2000 and Film Thaqafi (Cultural Film), the two that decided to wait it out till all three films had extensive runs, reveal the weaknesses of existing on the fringes of summer hype. You've got to be in the heart of it all for a grab at the big money. Omar hardly lasted two weeks (LE 130,000) and Thaqafi is still out there, at LE600,000 and slowly rising. Some of that potential revenue went to two other films, stragglers that came out of nowhere a few weeks ago and look like that's where they're headed as well. Together, Imra'a Taht Al-Moraqaba (A Woman Under Surveillance) and Abnaa Al-Shaytan (Devil's Children) have made just over LE500,000.
This summer's tape scene witnessed breakthroughs in marketing as well -- unfortunately, it also brought disappointments in quality. The city has never seen a more extensive display of its pop stars, with 10-metre-high billboards everywhere you turn. But music-wise, nothing is really rocking. Mohamed Mounir's hit song Fi Ishq Al-Banat (For the Love of Girls) has caused a minor ruckus, and Amr Diab's Tamali Ma'ak was certainly easy to listen to, in the tradition of Diab's growing repertoire of two-month shelf-life achievements; but overall, there's not much excitement on the music scene.
Ma'ak is so much like every year's tape that it's practically already forgotten. Even so, in terms of sales, Diab's tape came out on top, just slightly beating Mounir. Music producers have always been less likely to give out actual sales figures, so approximate ratings are compiled from the larger tape stores across the country.
Hisham Abbas tried to do something new with Habibi Da, but his merging of Arabic and Indian sounds and a video clip filmed at the Taj Mahal were not enough to make a maharaja of him -- no matter how he dressed. The clear winner this summer was Mounir. He sold more than he ever has, and, perhaps more importantly, had the whole country singing lyrics it didn't even understand.
Hakim's Yahoo, and the new tapes by Mohamed Fouad and Mustafa Qamar came loaded with expectations, but only managed to make a splash visually, if at all: Hakim on TV in a cell phone ad, and Fouad and Mustafa more looming than they'd ever been before on city billboards. Their tapes, along with everybody else's, for the most part inspired yawns, and poorer sales than ever.
The overall drop in tape sales should be sending a message to producers and artists that maybe it's time to try something new -- that the typical "Hsk-bsk" shababi sound has run its course. Mounir has always had that ability to go against the grain. Now that he's going more mainstream with it, and succeeding wildly, will the rest of the pack soon follow?
Related stories:
Porn to be wild 5 - 11 October 2000
Too much to say 28 Sep- 4 Oct. 2000
Hooligan with a heart 14 - 20 September 2000
Music in the sky 17 - 23 August 2000
Clash of the titans 3 - 9 August 2000
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