Census Bloodbath: Re-Modeled

Note: The only copy of this movie that I could access was in unsubtitled Hindi, so take my review with a huge grain of salt.

Year:
1984
Director:
I.V. Sasi
Cast:
Kamal Haasan, Reena Roy, Tina Munim
Run Time:
2 hours 10 minutes

Plot: Karishmaa follows photographer Sunny (Kamal Haasan, who also starred in the 1981 Kollywood movie of which this is a remake, Tik Tik Tik) as he befriends a group of models and begins dating one of them, Nisha (Reena Roy). When they begin dying one by one, he becomes the prime suspect.

Analysis: It is not uncommon for successful regional Indian films to be adapted into full-scale Hindi-language Bollywood productions, so it was perhaps inevitable that we'd be retracing our steps with an Indian slasher at some point. Although the Tamil-language movie Tik Tik Tik was not a success in its original run (nor did it really deserve to be), a Telugu-language dub later found a major audience, and I guess that was enough for Bollywood to snap it up, along with its original star.

Considering the fact that it's the same guy giving the same performance in the same story, it's a little hard to review Karishmaa on its own merits. In fact, it's practically a scene-for-scene remake (down to the weird moment where the horse shot glasses behind the main character's head trigger a neighing noise on the soundtrack whenever they appear), so the only texture comes from the slight differences between the two movies.

For instance, thanks to some careful tweaking, Karishmaa is even less of a horror movie than Tik Tik Tik, instead amplifying the action scenes. While this was annoying for the purposes of Census Bloodbath, it at least allowed for certain pleasures like the stately Bond villain of the original movie being transmogrified into an Evil Karate Guy.

Unfortunately, a great many of the changes that were made are for the worse. The main character is still a pathetic sleazebag (even more so, in fact) and they've given him a disgustingly precocious child sidekick this time around, just to rub salt in the wound. Plus, while the lingering specter of rape culture was present in every scene of the previous movie, Karishmaa adds a sexual assault element to the opening murder that pulls the subtext into text in a particularly gross way.

There are some good changes, at least. The kills we do get are slightly more grody and intense, which elevates the slasher element somewhat in spite of the fact that horror in general is hardly a priority here. Also, the musical numbers here are actively good rather than being bland lumps of nothing. 

The choreography (which includes a number where Nisha keeps teleporting around Sunny, and a fun moment where the couple is dancing with one another face-up on the ground) is creative and well-performed. Actually, Kamal Haasan is such a charming dancer that I almost liked his character more than I did in Tik Tik Tik.

That said, I enjoyed watching Karishmaa slightly less overall, presumably because I was essentially watching the exact same movie within a few hours of seeing the original. The changes aren't major enough to stand out, and the more or less even balance between good and bad changes results in the whole thing being kind of a wash.

Killer: Evil Karate Guy and His Henchmen

Final Girl: Sunny (Kamal Haasan) feat. Nisha (Reena Roy)

Best Kill: Even though I object to it lacking the operatic melodrama of the villain's death in Tik Tik Tik, Evil Karate Guy is crushed by a statue that falls on him, which is still a pretty exciting way to go.

Sign of the Times: The opening credits sequence is a disco meltdown featuring Sunny dancing in silhouette as eye-searing colors surge across the screen.

Scariest Moment: Sunny takes photos of Nisha while a fan is blowing her skirt up, and we're meant to like him. (This doubles as a secondary Sign of the Times.)

Weirdest Moment: Sunny discovers an important clue because he is woken up by it while napping on the beach.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 5; not including a goon who gets dragged on the ground by horses, but whose fate we never specifically learn.

1. Model #1 has a diamond carved out of her with a knife.
2. Model #2 is stabbed in the chest offscreen.
3. Goon is shot.
4. Bearded Guy dies of wounds sustained in a fight.
5. Evil Karate Guy is crushed by a falling statue.

TL;DR: Kharishmaa is a mostly useless remake, with the good changes and bad changes largely canceling each other out.

Rating: 5/10

Census Bloodbath: Goa Way

Year: 1985

Director: Keshu Ramsay

Cast: Rakesh Roshan, Marc Zuber, Aaloka

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

Plot: Haveli follows an undercover policeman following four suspects of a string of murders to a luxury hotel in Goa, India.

Analysis: A Note: This movie was only available to me in unsubtitled Hindi, so obviously my review is to be taken with a grain of salt, though I have made a point of focusing only on visual styling, music, and slasher structure rather than plot or acting.

So, I haven't really found a place in my heart for the early slashers out of Bollywood, as much as I love Indian cinema in general. However, 1985 seems to be the year that they really pulled out all the stops, between Cheekh and Haveli. This entry hails from another member of the Ramsay family, Keshu, whose brothers Tulsi and Shyam previously collaborated on the largely underwhelming Sannata and Saboot.

He clearly saw what his brothers were doing and felt the same way that I did, because Haveli is the most focused, genuinely slasher-y entry that Bollywood has produced yet. For one thing, the killer is actually delivering kills at a consistent pace and wearing a mask the entire time, which seems like a low bar if you haven't seen as many Bollywood slashers as I have. But also the mask is fucking cool, showing a pale face frozen in a hawklike cry, something like a cross between a Japanese oni and the Bride of Frankenstein.

I wouldn't say there's anything particularly substantial about the kills themselves, but there is always something reasonably exciting happening in Haveli, and for an early '80s low budget slasher that's two hours long, that's no small feat. 

Killer: A Man (shocking)

Final Girl: Not applicable, or at least not really

Best Kill: This one guy is "hanged" for all intents and purposes, but the killer uses their own hands instead of a rope. It's a whole thing!

Sign of the Times: Teased hair on the beach seems like a great idea to me.

Scariest Moment: A man is in his car when the killer smashes the windshield.

Weirdest Moment: The film is randomly set at Christmas, and one musical sequence keeps zooming in on a random giant cutout of Santa Claus.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 8

1. Woman is drowned in a bathtub.
2. Car Man is garroted. 
3. Man is killed offscreen.
4. Man #2 is hanged with hands.
5. Man #3 is slashed in an elevator.
6. Constable is stabbed.
7. Mustache Guy is shot.
8. Handcuff Man is defenestrated.

TL;DR: Haveli is another solid slasher out of Bollywood from 1985.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 442

Census Bloodbath: Before You Wreekh Yourself

Year: 1985

Director: Mohan Bhakri

Cast: Javed Khan, Deepika Chikhalia, Birbal

Run Time: 2 hours 11 minutes

Plot: Cheekh opens on the cruel and dictatorial Thakur (Madan Puri) doing cruel and dictatorial things before cutting to many years later. His daughter Deepa (Deepika Chikhalia) falls in love with the sculptor Sunil (Javed Khan of 1989's Khooni Murdaa), but a killer who is clearly seeking revenge for Thakur's past wrongs is lurking around the house. Also, Deepa and Sunil accidentally murder their friend Rohit (Raza Murad), so they must keep anyone from finding the body.

Analysis: A quick note: This film was only available to me in unsubtitled Hindi, so please take my review with a grain of salt. As always, I am focusing on the visual element of the film as well as how well it hews to the slasher formula, which is one that doesn't really require much script retention in the first place.

So it turns out that Bollywood was one of the quickest international cinema spaces to really hop on the slasher trend outside of North America. But after pumping out two films apiece in 1980 (Moodu Pani, Saboot) and 1981 (Sansani: The Sensation, Sannata), India seemed to have tired of the format until 1985 kicked things right back into gear. For my money, I'm glad they did, because Cheekh is the first film out of the five that actually feels like a slasher, which is very exciting.

Mind you, it's not always the best movie qua movies. There is an unfortunate reliance on shakycam when the filmmakers want to drum up some drama, there are a few quite egregious breaks of the 180 degree lines, and the shot of a man's gaze panning back and forth between a jar of poison (labelled, of course, "POISON") and his wife goes on for what feels like minutes too long. Oh, also there's a recurring gag that I believe is meant to be comedic where the punchline is that a woman is repeatedly sexually assaulted. Whee.....

That all definitely takes points off for Cheekh, but believe you me I've sat through much worse for this project. And as far as Bollywood slashers go, this is the cream of the crop. It's got a much better distribution of kills than the previous entries, keeping the pace up throughout, and even including a heaping helping of honest to God chase sequences! There may be a few too many scary moments that turn out to be pranks (including one that, if it happened in real life, would absolutely shatter the friendship between these people), but honestly that's still pretty consistent with the slasher formula. All that's missing is people doing impressions that are 30 years too old for them, and it's entirely possible that they did and I just missed it.

Finally, I'm proud to report, Cheekh is effectively scary more often than not. It's incredibly effective at drumming up nightmare imagery when it wants to, whether it's the material around Sunil hiding Mohit's body by slathering him in plaster and turning him into a sculpture, the scene where a medium accesses the spirit realm with a glowing red crystal ball, or several of the dynamic, quick-cutting sequences that blend chases with other frantic movement (especially dancing, because this is a Bollywood movie, after all). It's true that Cheekh is being graded on a scale that is heavily weighted toward 3/10 to 5/10 movies, but I had a blast with this one and that can't be discounted.

Killer: Deepa's Friend!

Final Girl: Deepa (Deepika Chikhalia)

Best Kill: I'm a sucker for any movie character in a wheelchair being dumped down the stairs, which is a real meat and potatoes murder movie classic.

Sign of the Times: Deepa's friend pranks her by dragging her into the water with her, which is not something you can do lightly in the age of cell phones.

Scariest Moment: The statue that Sunil has made of the corpse seems to come to life and chase Deepa.

Weirdest Moment: A woman takes a bath, wearing a full bra and panty set that is just getting drenched.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 11

1. Killer's Dad is stabbed in the gut.
2. Killer's Mom is stabbed in the gut.
3. Thakur has his wheelchair pushed down the stairs.
4. Man is burned to death.
5. Rohit is shot accidentally.
6. Woman is stabbed.
7. Bathtub Lady is whipped or something.
8. Doctor is killed indistinctly.
9. Karate Man super jumps and falls onto a blade.
10. Statue Man dies from various injuries sustained during a prolonged chase.
11. Deepa's Friend is shot.

TL;DR: Cheekh is far from perfect, but it's the best slasher Bollywood has put out in the '80s so far, in terms of both tension building and nightmare imagery.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 798

Census Bloodbath: Frankie Goes To Bollywood (Capsule Review)

Year: 1981

Director: Shyam & Tulsi Ramsay

Cast: Vijay Arora, Bindiya Goswami, Birbal

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

Plot: After businessman Girdharila is murdered by his cousin Dhanpat Rai, he himself is murdered. Girdharila's daughter Sapna and her lover investigate, as people at Dhanpat Rai's mansion begin to die one by one.

Analysis: A note: This film was only accessible to me in unsubtitled Hindi, so there are huge swaths of plot I had no way of understanding. As such, this review will focus on visuals and atmosphere, of which the film doesn't offer much to chew on. This film was directed by the Ramsay brothers, who previously collaborated on the Bollywood slasher Saboot, which focused on the murder, revenge, and general drama between people fighting for control of a family-run mill. This film continues to be a meditation along those lines, adding a heavy dose of Bollywood family drama to the first half of what ends up being a pretty standard slasher setup.

Unfortunately the first half is aesthetically unpleasing, so if it succeeds anywhere, it must be the script that I couldn't understand. Every scene is presented with flat, even lighting and a tendency to keep the scene in a master shot wherever possible. The initial musical number is also desperately bland, as the romantic leads flail their arms around in the rain. The only thing that livens up this part of the film are the brief moments where the Sapna seems to hallucinate a much better movie, with musical dream sequences including dancing skeletons, a ghostly disco, and a surf rock breakdown.

Thankfully the second half is a lively bit of slasher mayhem. There are some solid kills, including a Saw-esque trap where a man is hooked up to fuse box that electrocutes him when somebody comes into the room and turns on the light switch. There's also a faux-Argento touch that involves a stabbed woman falling into a bathtub and sloshing sudsy water all over the floor. The kills come thick and fast for a brief period that did win me over to the film's side, though it was still a hell of a slog to get to them in the first place.

Killer: I honestly have no idea

Final Girl: Sapna

Best Kill: A woman has a noose slung around her neck and she is instantly dragged into the air and hanged from a tall tree.

Sign of the Times: The fact that after Saboot was a failure as a slasher, they went right ahead and made another one the next year.

Scariest Moment: The hostel seems to be run by a Torgo-esque figure in a blazer and no shirt.

Weirdest Moment: Did I mention the dancing skeleton surf rock number?

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 8; this number is probably off by at least one, because I have a sneaking suspicion that one late kill is just a flashback retelling of a kill that occurred earlier.

1. Girdharila is thrown off a balcony.
2. Dhanpat Rai is killed offscreen.
3. Woman is stabbed in the back.
4. Man is electrocuted.
5. Woman #2 is hanged from a tree.
6. Man #2 killed by trees or something.
7. Woman #3 is shot.
8. Sombrero Man Who Might be Dhanpat Rai in Flashback is strangled.

TL;DR: Sannata is a passable slasher by the standards of the Ramsay brothers, but those are pretty low standards.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 566

Reviewing Jane: I Found Myself, By Insensible Degrees, Sincerely Fond Of Her

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen.

Year: 2000

Director: Rajiv Menon

Cast: Tabu, Mammootty, Aishwarya Rai

Run Time: 2 hours 28 minutes

Now I wouldn't exactly say I am the most qualified critic to be reviewing Bollywood cinema, even though I spent the better part of this year familiarizing myself with the form before reviewing Aisha (I did this for fun, not for Aisha, but it's a happy coincidence nonetheless). But I am DEFINITELY not the most qualified critic to be reviewing Kollywood, the Indian Tamil-language cinema out of Kodambakkam. Although this particular entry, a Tamil adaptation of Sense and Sensibility titled Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It), shares a lot of its DNA with the Bollywood films I have seen, there is a distinct dreamlike quality to the film that I will dive into in greater detail. I can't say for sure whether this is an aspect unique to Kandukondain Kandukondain or Tamil cinema in general, though I do hope I have further opportunity to educate myself on that.

I'm just saying, I will be approaching this review specifically as a Jane Austen adaptation rather than as a piece of Tamil cinema. I am completely ready to weather any criticism of me misunderstanding what it means to be the latter.

You should ALWAYS take any movie review with a grain of salt, but I'm just saying that in terms of personal experience you should perhaps trust my judgment on, say, 80's slashers, more than Indian musical romantic comedies, though both have given me great joy in my time.

The sensible Sowmya (Tabu) and the passionate Meenakshi (Aishwarya Rai, who also starred in the Bollywood-style Bride & Prejudice in 2004, so I guess she found herself a niche) are two sisters in a palatial Indian estate whose mother is constantly trying to marry off. Sowmya worries that the gossip about her being unlucky might turn out to be true, because her first fiance committed suicide after an affair in America, and her new lover Manohar (Ajith Kumar) has refused to get married until he finishes his first film, which is beset with problems. Meenakshi, on the other hand, is aware that wounded veteran Bala (Mammootty) is hopelessly in love with her, but she spurns the older man in favor of the dashing banker Srikanth (Abbas), though she is unaware that his constant poetry-quoting and sweet nothings are partially an attempt to distract her from the fact business is on the brink of ruin.

When their grandfather dies, leaving the estate to a capricious uncle and his wife, who kick out the family, they must start from scratch. Sowmya finds menial work at a software company despite her great computer skills, and Bala helps Meenakshi get a job at a music college. 

Because one of her great talents, aside from crying, is singing.

What's truly remarkable about Kandukondain Kandukondain is that, despite the requisite 2 and a half hour run time, the plot moves at a blistering clip. Especially when it comes to the heaving drama of Meenakshi's storyline (which tracks, because she's the resident Marianne), hardly a minute goes by where she's not stumbling into some new disastrous predicament or other. Some of this might have to do with the interesting choice to rearrange the order of events from the novel, not plunging the sisters into poverty until about halfway through rather than at the very beginning. We get to spend time with their romantic travails before their sink into ruin and watch how those dynamics shift afterward as well. 

Despite playing it fast and loose with the chronology, this is actually the modernization of the material that captures the flow of the novel best, actually realizing every major moment of the romantic arcs rather than just paying lip service to "rich sisters are poor now, whoops." Perhaps one other reason the plot appears to move so quickly is the fact that it needs to squeeze itself between the extended musical numbers. This is hardly unusual from the Bollywood movies that I've seen, but Kandukondain Kandukondain has an even more fixed devotion to unreality. Although the Bollywood musical numbers I've seen could hardly give a rat's ass about things like visual geography or narrative realism (to their credit, I might add), Kandukondain Kandukondain does them one better by having its numbers take place in what I would almost describe as a dream space, transporting its characters to new locations entirely, ones that we've never seen before and never will again, rather than having song and dance break out in the general setting in which the film takes place.

It's like a series of music videos keep breaking into the movie and running away with the characters. Some of these videos are Salvador Dalí nightmares (Meenakshi's first solo song sees her accompanied by backup dancers in a series of increasingly surreal costumes, including blue and black body paint, elephant heads, and big flat masks of the same turbaned man), some of them are gothic romance (including a dream ballet in a crumbling castle), some are classic Hollywood (one takes place on a giant film set of a boat, even though the movie Manohar is making is about a train) and some are... on train tracks in front of the Sphinx? They average out at about six minutes long apiece, and they pepper the film with a surreal quality that is compounded by how many opportunities there are to have musical numbers in a 150-minute film.

I don't think I disliked it at all. In fact, I might have loved it. But I certainly don't fully understand it. It's languorous and weird, and not given clarity by the film's tendency to transition between completely unrelated scenes introduced by characters we've never met with reckless abandon, but the music is generally pleasant and while the dancing is not particularly inspired, especially by the standards of what I have seen come out of Indian choreographers, it's certainly an inimitable experience.

Look, I've seen a loooot of movies. If you give me something I haven't seen before, that counts for a lot. Even if it's... whatever this is.

Even though the storytelling frequently leaves me flummoxed, the visual eye that brings the musical numbers together is clearly at play during the dialogue scenes as well. There's a beautiful, heart-rending sequence at the grandfather's funeral that fades to the workers cleaning his funeral petals off the floor in an empty ballroom, and the camera sometimes launches into wild positions to match the mood of the scene, capturing lonely anguish from an isolating bird's eye view or diving deep beneath the water when you least expect it.

Kandukondain Kandukondain also hits the mark by once again showing that Jane Austen's works, despite the tutting of certain pretentious folks who take her work altogether too seriously (this coming from a guy who's reviewed 26 movies based on her novels), are hilarious romantic comedies. The film embraces that spirit with moments like the wacky Hollywood satire on Manohar's film set, a romantic moment involving Sowmya being hit in the eye with a piece of paper, or a scene of mistaken identity that provides a cringe-inducing spot of mirth.

Altogether there is a lot to like, and perhaps even love, about Kandukondain Kandukondain. I certainly have my doubts about lifting it into the rafters as a minted classic Austen adaptation (once again, the age difference between the Colonel Brandon and Marianne characters doesn't translate too too far past the 1800's), but as a detour into an avenue of cinema I didn't even know existed until turning it on, it was certainly a delight.

TL;DR: Kandukondain Kandukondain is a spellbinding experience, despite its many eccentricities.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1297

Other Films Based on Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995)
Kandukondain Kandukondain (Menon, 2000)
Material Girls (Coolidge, 2006)
From Prada to Nada (Gracia, 2011)
Scents and Sensibility (Brough, 2011)
Sense, Sensibility, and Snowmen (Winning, 2019)

Reviewing Jane: Without Music, Life Would Be A Blank To Me

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen.

Year: 2010

Director: Rajshree Ojha

Cast: Sonam Kapoor, Abhay Deol, Amrita Puri

Run Time: 2 hours 6 minutes

Bollywood and Jane Austen are a match made in heaven. A modern culture with strict class divides that retains some focus on arranging marriages, and a romantic comedy art form that expresses this culture which spends a large amount of time focusing on dance? Yeah, it's no surprise Hindi cinema and Austen's novels found each other. Our first experience with this intersection was the sublime Bride & Prejudice (which, to be fair, was an English film with an Indian director and cast that is more inspired by Bollywood than strictly belonging to it, but an excellent example nonetheless).

Today we alight upon Aisha, an adaptation of Emma. I approached it cautiously, because it is a fool's errand to assume any movie will be as good as Bride & Prejudice, let alone merely because they share the same country of origin.

Smart move, Brennan.

Aisha tells the story of - you guessed it - Aisha (Sonam Kapoor), a layabout rich daddy's girl from Delhi who struts the shops with her best friend Pinky (Ira Dubey). When charity case Shefali (Amrita Puri) arrives in Delhi from her home in a neighboring village, Aisha decides to make her over and fix her up with confectionary heir Randhir (Cyrus Sahukar). Of course this goes horribly awry, and Aisha finds herself scolded as ever by family friend Arjun (Abhay Deol), with whom she has a very antagonistic relationship that may or may not blossom into love, no spoilers.

JK, it totally does.

Anyway, first, Aisha must find herself entangled even further in the love lives of her friends, becoming especially complicated when the handsome Dhruv (Arunoday Singh) comes to town.

Additionally, for the Austen scholars out there, while Dhruv is pretty clearly our analogue for Frank Churchill, once more the character of Jane Fairfax seems to have been removed, this time replaced with the general idea of the city of Mumbai. Poor Jane Fairfax.

Emma is a particularly challenging novel to bring to the screen, so it's a very pleasant surprise that we've already gotten two masterpieces from it (1995's Clueless and Autumn de Wilde's Emma. from earlier this year, though it feels a lifetime ago). So I'm not exactly disappointed that Aisha is terminally mediocre. It's better than being actively painful to watch, cough cough Gwyneth Paltrow. 

In fact, it's almost annoying that nothing in the movie is particularly bad. If it had been, it might at least have made more of an impression on me. OK, the score is pretty bad, with its overreliance on saccharine Looney Tunes marimbas to really nail in that this. is. a. COMEDY. But beyond that, it's just plain plain. It doesn't help that I could recite the plot of Emma in my sleep at this point, but maybe that's not even an unfair bias because this movie nakedly cribs from Clueless more than the actual source text (see: the scene where they're on the couch fighting over the remote, the scene where she is left stranded in an unsafe neighborhood and needs to be picked up, the fact that she has a best friend/sidekick in the first place, etc. etc. etc.). The one place where it strays from the template of either work is the scene that gives Shefali a bit more grit in standing up for herself than any Harriet analogue has ever been given.

But whatever text it's using, it relies on it too much to make the romance click. Aisha gives a heartfelt speech in the end detailing all the ways Arjun has helped her in her life, bringing up a heap of examples that haven't been depicted or even hinted at in the film. We know they're meant to be together because of the source material, rather than the pair of them actually having any chemistry.

I have nothing against the performances in particular, it's just that Aisha is particularly obsessed with keeping its leads separate from one another, even for an Austen tale.

But here's the thing. A theory I have developed over the course of reviewing over two dozen Austen adaptations is that the obligatory big dance scene is the key to whether or not a film has any drive to craft a valuable cinematic experience rather than just blow Austen's story up onscreen and go through the motions with little thought to making a film object that's interesting in any way. Seeing as how dance is key to the language of Bollywood filmmaking, I thought this would be a home run. And it is, briefly. Oh so briefly. 

Aisha and her friends visit a club that turns into a sexy, chaotic, colorful Hindi tango where partner-switching mayhem leaves Aisha alone in a twirling maelstrom of bodies. Through motion and music, the dynamics between the characters are brought to light, in the manner of the best Austen adaptations. Unfortunately, every other musical moment leaves a lot to be desired, so it recklessly dilutes the power of this moment. 

The other music is presented lackadaisically, plastered over endless music video montages that do nothing to further the story (one of them is a particularly craven three minute L'Oréal ad), and the ever-important finale number that graces even most music-free Bollywood flicks is, to be frank, abysmal. It's flatly choreographed, shot and edited in a confusing flurry, and is plastered over with a poorly mixed song that's largely a cappella, leaving the poor actors to flounder, attempting to dance cheerily over a track that literally doesn't even have a beat. 

Let's call this an exception to my theory. Most Austen films only have one opportunity to present us with dance, and live or die on that opportunity. Here we are given a cool half dozen, and one successful scene doesn't lift up the tiresome mass of the rest. Such is the way with the movie as a whole. Altogether most of the ideas here aren't terrible, they just aren't aiming high enough. They might clear the low bar to exist as a mildly enjoyable Austen adaptation, but they graze the bar with their foot and faceplant right into the mat in the process.

TL;DR: Aisha does the bare minimum to exist as either a Jane Austen adaptation or a Bollywood romantic comedy.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1076

Other Films Based on Emma

Clueless (Heckerling, 1995)

Emma (McGrath, 1996)

Emma (Lawrence, 1996)

Aisha (Ojha, 2010)

Emma. (de Wilde, 2020)