CAIRO – Once in a long while, there comes a film that should have it all, especially if it's already based on as solid premise – even if it's just an advertising campaign like the new Eid film "Ana Badiy' Ya Wadi'" (I'm in Trouble, Wadi'). The film stars Amin Andil as the producer Tohomi, and Amged Adel as Wadi', the assistant. The film's premise is simple, as it should be for film like this, so it can leave as much room for the comedy as one would think would be available. The film revolves around the producer's trouble with the Taxation Department, which leads to his assistant taking a page from Mel Brooks' classic film "The Producers", to make a movie so bad that when it fails, they could declare it on his taxes and he wouldn't have pay the eight million pounds he owes. At the beginning of the film, we see how successful Tohami films are always. They star the sex siren "Monea", played by the Lebanese actress Lamita – but that's about as far as the substance of his films go – just bunch of movies full of big breasted women. When he actually wants to get serious for once, and calls actors such as Adel Imam and Mohamed Henedi, they both hang up on him; even Nelly Kareem in her (useless) cameo didn't want to do anything to do with him. Then there is Intasar, who Iím not exactly sure why she was in the movie to begin with, plays "Ilham" Wadi's plain spinster sister who, with help from Tohami's mother, played here again by Amin Andil in drag, gets cleaned up. The film is directed by Sherif Abdean, and written by Mohamed Fadl, but to call it a film would be kind of unfair to the audience. It's not really a film, it's just scenes that are cut and pasted together badly; they are not even funny skits. One would call them a parody, but there was only one real parody montage that could be considered as such. When the two were thinking of ideas that would make a bad film, they considered making a movie about the October 6th war, an "Omaret Yaqubian" (The Jacoban Building, 2007) parody, a badly translated English-language gangster film, and a take on the popular Turkish soap opera "Al-Eshq Al-Mamnu'" (Forbidden Love) called "Al- Ashiq we Al-Ma'shuq" (The Lover and the Beloved) complete with Levantine dialect dubbing. This portion of the film was actually the funniest part of the movie. Actually, this is the part of film which most resembled the tongue-in-cheek character of the original Melody commercials, and that's why they were probably done great. Unfortunately, this was around fifteen minutes worth of an approximately 90 minute film. When the director actually got into the bigger picture or main story of the movie, it was still filmed as a commercial, but the narrative of the entire film was gone. The individual scenes never went over two minutes max, and some were only for few seconds. You almost feel as if the cameraman was perpetually running low on batteries. Short scenes can be done well, but here they didn't consist of any substance, not thatís something someone would look for in this kind of movie, but there was nothing to laugh about either. It was clear that directing this film was too much for Sherif Abdean, but of course he didn't have a great script to work with either. In fact, he had a very bad and bland script to work with, which is disappointing, because based on the commercials one would think that you would have a lot of material to work with. Doing a satire on cinema, you would want a film of full of stars making cameos. I don't doubt that they offered stars cameo appearances, but apparently Nelly Kareem was only one who accepted, and even then, her role wasn't used correctly since no laughs came out of it. What's really disappointing about the film though, is that so much more could have been expected. The lead actors are talented and funny; the film itself didn't cost much to make, so money was obviously not a hindrance here. The entire blame for the failure of this film falls completely on the director, the writer, and the editor, since this was one of the worst edited and worst paced of any recent Egyptian films. If the average filmgoer needs evidence as to how important the correct editing of scenes is to the overall quality of the movie, they need look only as far as this film to see a one crushed by poor editing.
