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)

Reviewing Jane: I Am Only Kept Back By My Natural Awkwardness

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

Year: 2006

Director: Martha Coolidge

Cast: Hilary Duff, Haylie Duff, Anjelica Huston 

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

We have had an unusually high number of female directors in this movie marathon, even considering that being a Jane Austen adaptation lands you squarely in Hollywood's "chick flick" corner, where they sometimes, grudgingly, let women have jobs. Most of the genre's best entries have come from women, surprise surprise. And Material Girls, the 2006 modernization of Sense and Sensibility that seems to have kicked off a small glut of copycat adaptations in the late 2000's, didn't lack a pedigree. It comes from director Martha Coolidge, after all, of the original Valley Girl. 

But here's the thing. I don't really like the original Valley Girl, and stars Hilary and Haylie Duff are no Deborah Foreman and Nicolas Cage.

Material Girls is the story of sisters Tanzie (Hilary Duff) and Ava (Haylie Duff) Marchetta, two ditsy Paris Hilton analogues who are the faces of their late father's makeup line. When a recall scandal hits the company's newest product, hawkish cosmetics mogul Fabiella Du Mont (Anjelica Huston) seeks to buy the company out from under them. The girls are left with nothing, forced to live with their former maid Inez (Maria Conchita Alonso), and build themselves back up from the ground up. Just kidding, they do what rich people do and cause chaos while never really actually suffering, but they do have to ride the bus. Despicable!

Also there's some men in their lives. Pro bono lawyer Henry (Lukas Haas) and chemist Rick (Marcus Coloma) both help them along their journeys. I didn't see fit to mention him here, but also Brent Spiner is skulking around playing the oily businessman in charge of the company's interests.

But why did I even bother listing any other cast members? ANJELICA HUSTON is in the movie, people! This is not a drill!

Would you believe that Material Girls opens with Hilary and Haylie Duff embalming a cover of a Madonna song beneath a heavy layer of shiny mid-2000's pop lacquer? Guess which song!

The movie exists as a vehicle for the Duff sisters, not so much for their talents, but rather as an excuse to hold them up to the light to let them sparkle and distract tweens for 100 minutes. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's just that nobody else making the movie bothered to give the girls any sort of support system, including - let me check my notes - a screenplay.

Instead, we get a parade of gags that indulge in the basest instincts of mid-2000's film comedy. Suicide jokes, multiple queer characters who exist only to be mocked, and gags about nose jobs and eating disorders are just the tip of the iceberg here. 

Are you sold yet?

I think I've discovered the flaw of Jane Austen's work that has allowed for so many mediocre modernizations. Her most popular novels have become so iconic they can be boiled down to a simple log line that everyone knows, so nobody has to actually read them. That's how we get a million Pride and Prejudice clones that toss a vaguely handsome man named "Darcy" at a woman and have them not get along at first before falling in love. The world has accepted that this is what Pride and Prejudice is about, ignoring the nuances of the storyline and characters.

The same tragic fate has befallen Sense and Sensibility. "Sisters were rich and now they are poor" is an absolute brutalization of that sharp, shimmering satire, and not even all the movies can get that right. Let us not forget Sense and Sensibility and Snowmen, which is about sisters... and one of them doesn't get along with a guy at first before they fall in love. 

Sadly, Material Girls opts to fill everything around that paper thin log line with bloviating nonsense and references skimmed off the very surface of contemporary culture. Martha Coolidge might have directed herself an iconic teen movie once upon a time, but that time has passed and Clueless this ain't.

TL;DR: Material Girls is a shallow, unaffecting, unsurprisingly loose adaptation of an Austen classic.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 717

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)

Census Bloodbath: The Lunatic Is In The Hall

Year: 1982

Director: Jack Sholder

Cast: Jack Palance, Donald Pleasence, Martin Landau 

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Up until now, I've been going through 1982 in pretty much chronological order, but I just had to skip ahead for two reasons: 1) I'm going to be speaking about this movie with the Keep Screaming podcast in about a month. 2) Alone in the Dark is the film on my remaining 1982 list that enjoys the loftiest reputation, so I seized onto it like a life raft, in a fit of desperation after a couple real stinkers.

Time to see if I made the right decision.

Alone in the Dark is perhaps the most diffuse slasher we've ever covered because it focuses on no less than four different killers, the psychopaths who populate the third floor of an asylum in sleepy Springwood. New psychologist Dan Potter (Dwight Schultz) has moved into town with his wife Nell (Deborah Hedwall) and daughter Lyla (Elizabeth Ward), and are soon visited by his nuclear activist sister Toni (Lee Taylor-Allan), who is recovering from her own mental breakdown.

At work, Dan meets the psychopaths: Frank Hawkes (the Jack Palance), a veteran who is the de facto leader of the group; Preacher (the Martin Landau), a man who constantly lets loose a stream of religious fundamentalist babble; Fatty (Erland van Lidth), a child molester; and The Bleeder, who doesn't like to show his face (leading him to wear a pre-Friday the 13th hockey mask) but gets a nosebleed whenever he strangles his victims.

They are kept in bounds by an electric security system manned by the hippy dippy Dr. Leo Bain (Donald Pleasence), who thinks the world is the place that's crazy and the people under his care are "voyagers" into new spaces of the mind. Of course, there's a blackout and the killers are released. After a murder spree, they focus their sights on Dr. Potter, who they think has killed their former doctor, who just left for another job.

Donald Pleasence really needs to stop being hired to be in charge of mental patients, he really can NOT keep track of them.

Alone in the Dark is a curious beast. You've already seen the ways the structure breaks from the established slasher norm (and after the landmark year of 1981, which saw the release of literally dozens of theatrical slasher movies), and it breaks down even further when it becomes a home invasion/siege movie in the third act. But it was also the first film produced by a little distribution company known as New Line Cinema, which would eventually strike gold two years later with the release of an indie cheapie called A Nightmare on Elm Street.

An indie cheapie that would spawn a litany of sequels, the first of which was directed by Jack Sholder of... Alone in the Dark. Dude kept himself a job. 

And while your mileage on Freddy's Revenge may vary, the opening scene of Alone in the Dark is more than enough to prove to me how he got the gig. It's a dream from Preacher's perspective that takes place in a generic small town diner which slowly devolves into surreality, from a frog hopping across the counter to rain suddenly pouring from the ceiling. It's an impeccably crafted scene that has nothing to do with the remainder of the movie, but that doesn't mean it's not effective as a little capsule of nightmare fuel.

And I can't say I'm not grateful for this image.

I mostly get what Alone in the Dark is going for. It's attempting to show that Dr. Bain is right: the world we live in is crazy, and maybe those who society sees fit to put away aren't the ones we should be afraid of. The second the blackout occurs, the looting and rioting begins (this is apparently based on real incidents at the time as well), and the movie spends a lot of town fleshing out Toni's nuclear protest and the live wire rock 'n roll music that fuels her. Violence and chaos are everywhere in 1982, not just in the psychos behind the mask. But this is a slasher movies and they do need to chop up people, so they're really trying to have their cake and eat it too.

The place they're most successful is actually with the character Fatty, whose crimes are most irredeemable. However, his arc implies that he might actually be attempting to improve himself as a human being, and his inevitable eventual death is given the most heartbreaking coda. 

So this is all interesting, if not particularly well-executed. Unfortunately the slasher movie elements are worth far less. The gore budget on this film is nil, so a lot of the bloodier kills are edited into ribbons, giving the vaguest impression of what is even happening. I know down below, my description for kill #3 sounds very confident, but I have about 10% clarity on what actually happened beyond a vague slashing motion and a gob of goo that represents a completely illegible mystery internal organ.

And Jason wore it better, too.

And this is all presented rather plainly. Beyond the first sequence, the only moment that shows any sense of flair is a shot of Toni slowly drifting across the room to close an open window while absolute hell breaks loose behind her in deep focus. Also, I'm not going to complain about a movie that gets such heavy-hitters to play its killers. Unfortuantely, they're poorly written personalities and aren't given enough screen time to really ham it up. Thus, the character that emerges as truly iconic is a horny teen neighbor mysteriously named Bunky (Carol Levy), who gives the bizarre snack-devouring girl in Death Valley a run for her money as my favorite Census Bloodbath babysitter.

The way it all shakes out, I think I liked this film. But I'm incredibly far from loving it. It's fun to see the trends in horror (and New Line specifically) it's predicting, but pretty much everything on display here would be perfected later in the cycle.

Killer: Frank Hawkes (Jack Palance), Preacher (Martin Landau), Fatty (Erland van Lidth), and The Bleeder

Final Girl: The whole Potter family

Sign of the Times: When Toni first shows up, she is dressed like Hello Kitty joined the Cobra Kai dojo.

Best Kill: I love when the lieutenant is attached to a tree via crossbow bolt to the gut, because it's one of the only truly good effects and also it's the moment that really launches the movie into high adrenaline mode until the credits roll.

Scariest Moment: Lyla is cornered by Fatty who starts trying to groom her while they're alone together in her house.

Weirdest Moment: The asylum's post-blackout roll call includes the names David and Lisa.

Champion Dialogue: "What are you, some kind of asshole?"

Body Count: 12; committed by a good half dozen characters.

1. Curtis has his back broken over Fatty's knee.
2. Larkin has his head punched through a car window.
3. Looter has his larynx removed with a hand rake.
4. Mailman is hit with a van.
5. Billy is killed offscreen.
6. Bunky is lifted into the air and strangled.
7. Lt. Burnett is shot in the gut with a crossbow.
8. Dr. Leo Bain is axed.
9. Fatty is cleavered in the back and the cleaver is hit with a bat.
10. Tom is stabbed in the gut.
11. Preacher is stabbed in the back.
12. Bouncer has his head smashed against a wall.

TL;DR: Alone in the Dark does enough off-template stuff to distinguish itself, but it's not a particularly energetic slasher.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1274

Reviewing Jane: It's Such A Happiness When Good People Get Together

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

Year: 2020

Director: Autumn de Wilde

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn, Bill Nighy

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

"Do we need another adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma?" cried the dozens of people who even heard this movie was coming out. Even though it's a title that hasn't really been dusted off this decade (even by the Austen-hungry Hallmark crew), I understand the perceived fatigue. The triple punch of adaptations that started with Amy Heckerling's Clueless, followed by Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Beckinsale's turns at bat, sprinted across screens in a span of just 16 months between 1995 and 1996. That's a whole lot of Emma.

But Autumn de Wilde's Emma. has come along anyway, to prove that the answer to that question is a vigorous yes.

I didn't even need the movie to prove this to me, because the Gwyneth and Kate adaptations SUCKED, so we've never had a straight period adaptation of the story that's remotely worthwhile. But I respect Autumn De Wilde's flex regardless.

If you missed the 90's, here's the gist of the plot. Handsome, rich, and spoiled Emma Woodhouse (Anya Taylor-Joy) lives in luxurious solitude with her hypochondriac father (Bill Nighy). She strokes her ego by matchmaking her friends about town, and when a young rube of unknown birth named Harriet Smith (Mia Goth) she seizes upon the opportunity to make her into a fine young gentlewoman and foist her on any man that's around, blithely unaware that the men would generally rather eat dirt than marry her.

All throughout a variety of romantic misadventures that involve a revolving door of alabaster British character actors I can't be bothered to tell apart (sorry Callum Turner and Josh O'Connor), Emma is admonished by old family friend Mr. Knightley (Johnny Flynn), the only person who ever seems to find fault with her. Naturally they fall in love.

Trust me when I say that her marrying someone who literally held her as a baby is one of the least creepy romantic matches in the Jane Austen universe.

I have a lot of very nice things to say about Emma. but I should probably start with what you can tell from the screenshots I've already used. This movie is gorgeous, darling. Every second of this film looks like a watercolor that could be hung in a museum, with luscious pastels smeared across every flat surface, outfits, and even the sky. It's like an Easter candle melted all over Regency England's tablecloth. It takes the fussy diorama sets of your run-of-the-mill Masterpiece adaptations and pushes them to the extreme, filling every corner of the frame with delicately piled pastries, colorful gewgaws, and the like.

Bear witness.

But all of this doesn't mean that Emma. is stiff and emotionally unavailable; far from it. The rigid grandeur of the sets serves as a vicious juxtaposition to the ridiculous antics of the rich fools contained within them. De Wilde and screenwriter Eleanor Catton have strung up a marvelous high wire act of tone here, delivering a sketch of messy humanity despite its extreme, almost cartoonish stylization. And in the process, they've captured Austen's tone better than any other period adaptation.  Her stories are emotionally resonant, sure, but the characters that populate them are daffy satirical caricatures of the upper classes.

These filmmakers get it, and I'm so thankful somebody finally has. They have stacked layers and layers upon the script here, bringing the novel to life perhaps even more than the novel itself was capable of. The first layer they start with is one I don't think I've ever seen in a period-set Austen adaptation: rich people fucking suck. They enforce a class system that limits the prospects of other people, just because they get to be at the top. They employ and ignore a veritable army of servants (this film, more than any other, depicts the sheer, overwhelming mass of staff required to make these people's lives possible). And they're used to getting everything they want, which is why it's so hard for Emma when the matches she tries to force keep falling through.

Starting in a place that acknowledges the fact that the characters (including the protagonist and her father) are grotesque and despicable allows for the film to mine the material for every ounce of acid-tongued, sour sarcasm it can produce. They aren't here to make Emma likable. That was the whole point of the novel: Austen set out to "take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like," because it's way more interesting to watch a heroine overcome a massive flaw and earn her true love rather than some pure, milquetoast waif suffering until she's rewarded with a handsome prince.

Embracing the black comedy is a hugely important decision in making this Emma work, and it pays off in the form of the funniest straight Austen adaptation by a long shot. The actors are all game, especially Nighy, Taylor-Joy (whose clipped haughtiness is best displayed in a scene you can see in the trailer, where she opens the window of her carriage to a tiresome neighbor with a languorous flick of a finger), and Miranda Hart as the aforementioned tiresome neighbor. Hart could easily have been a one-note cartoon character, and she still would have been terrifically entertaining. But later she gets to deliver a scene of so much heartbreaking pathos that it provides the fuel for the emotional climax of the entire two hour film.

And now I finally have her name reinforced in my memory enough to stop calling her Friend from Spy!

Allowing the film to be funny and the characters to have foibles also does wonders in translating the humanity of these characters to modern day cinemagoers. These are not fossils locked in amber whose motivations and reactions can only be understood from a remove. They are messy, engaging, people who live and breathe and feel, whether they're frolicking around having fun with a pack of schoolgirls or wracked with weeping sobs over a year of terrible decisions. Even if you know nothing about the period, you know exactly what these people are feeling because they're allowed to be real.

This is well served by the film's choices about nudity and violence. Obviously it's very mild; they're not doing a gritty reboot here. But there are two scenes early on that display casual non-eroticized nudity and one scene involving a nosebleed in the climax that make the characters literally vulnerable. They're showing that underneath their endless layers of petticoats and gentility there still lies flesh, blood, and a beating heart.

One thing I especially love about the emotional capacity of this film is what it does with the character of Harriet. She's portrayed rightly as a suffering fool, but this is the first adaptation I've seen that fully allows her to be angry with Emma and the way she has toyed with her life like a bored cat. Even in the novel, Harriet's reaction to the final straw that severs their friendship is muted and elliptically delivered. But here, we get to sit in it and really dig into the chaos that Emma has sown among the people in her life. 

OK before I yammer on even more: Yes, everything in this movie is good and you should go see it as soon as you get the chance. Literally the only thing preventing me from embracing this as the best Austen I've ever seen is my overfamiliarity with the material. So allow me a couple years to sit on this and revisit, and we can reconvene during our Best of the 2020's conversation.

TL;DR: Emma. is a delightfully acerbic and beautiful adaptation that would do Jane Austen proud.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1309
Other Films Based on Emma
Clueless (Heckerling, 1995)
Emma (McGrath, 1996)
Emma (Lawrence, 1996)
Aisha (Ojha, 2010)
Emma. (de Wilde, 2020)

Reviewing Jane: I Will Be Mistress Of Myself

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

Year: 1995

Director: Ang Lee

Cast: Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant

Run Time: 2 hours 16 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Emma Thompson is a force of nature, y'all. After over a decade of acting (and the occasional dabbling in TV writing) she undertook her first feature film screenplay, an adaptation of a literary giant. Although the Oscar-winning Sense and Sensibility was part of the banner year that brought Jane Austen into the rabid mainstream popularity that she still enjoys today (also in 1995, the culture was buffeted by BBC's Pride and Prejudice miniseries and Amy Heckerling's Clueless), this was still a daunting undertaking.

She didn't even break a sweat, assembling a cast of future A-list superstars to breathe life into what still stands strong as one of the best Austen adaptations to date. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Let's jump back to the early 1800's for a moment, shall we?

In Sense and Sensibility, rich sisters Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslet, two years before Titanic would change her life forever) live with their parents and kid sister. Unfortunately, their father passes away before either of them marry, leaving them penniless (his entire estate went to their half-brother, whose avaricious wife talks him out of supporting them). They move to a small cottage out in the country (with three bedrooms and two servants, the sheer poverty is overwhelming), where they have a variety of romantic adventures in which Elinor leads with her logic and Marianne dashes forward full force with her heart.

The men in their lives are awkward but charming brother-in-law (this is not the creepiest intra-family romance in the Austen universe, believe me) Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), the dashing but licentious John Willoughby (Greg Wise), and the older but devoted Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), who Marianne turns her nose up at without a second thought.

I mean, wouldn't you ignore Alan Rickman for the raw sensual power of that hat?

As we learned from this year's Oscars, where Parasite won Best Picture, sometimes the Academy gets it right. And they certainly did when they awarded Emma Thompson for Best Adapted Screenplay. The whole point of this project is weighing the way different people adapt Austen's work, and as Thompson's mighty act of rendering the original 1811 novel as a feature film is beyond compare. 

To start off, she does what I have been begging these screen adaptations to do from the very beginning, retaining the acidic sarcasm of Austen's original texts. The Austen novels have always been funny in a hyper-modern snarky way; you just have to crack open the period dialogue to get to that candy center. And this is an extraordinarily funny film, especially given the standards of your average Hollywood period piece costume drama. MVP goes to Imelda Staunton as a chatty, ditzy woman with a husband who visibly despises spending time with her, but the entire cast is expert at delivering Thompson's wickedly sharp dialogue, which sometimes directly draws out the best passages from the novel, and largely synthesizes the source text's themes and moods into new delicious combinations.

The reason the humor works especially well is because Thompson has done the legwork of making the period and the characters within it come to life, humanizing conflicts and interactions that might normally seem distant and outdated to a modern audience member. One trick I especially appreciate her using is the way she overlaps dialogue. Even in scenes when our main characters aren't speaking, there is boisterous conversation floating in through windows or from other rooms, bringing the world to messy, vibrant life instead of embalming it in stuffy, fussy costumes and sets that seem hermetically sealed from the real world.

Also it helps that they cast at least one movie star-handsome romantic lead, something the previous BBC adaptations perpetually failed to do.

All you need to stand out among the crowd of these Austen adaptations is a sharp script and actors who know how to deliver the material, which Sense and Sensibility confidently provides (Thompson, especially when she gets her big Oscar-worthy monologue, is reliably terrific on top of everything else). Unfortunately, there is something that doesn't quite connect emotionally, at least for this reviewer.

It doesn't help that Sense and Sensibility is mostly about the relationship between two sisters, and their interactions as they long for men from afar. Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman are necessarily forced offscreen for longer than one might like if we're meant to feel heaving romantic paroxysms. And while both Thompson and Winslet are delivering the material well, it's challenging to buy their sisterly relationship when the former is visibly 16 years older than the latter. While this casting choice at least visually highlights the way that Elinor is more capable and mature than her younger sister, it leaves a gaping crack in the foundation of the relationship that is meant to propel the emotional core of the movie. 

And frankly, of Ang Lee's mainstream, well-regarded works, this is the entry in which I find the least to be impressed with. While Thompson does all the legwork in bringing the characters to life, I find that Lee and his creative vision gets lost in the period detail rather than bringing the camera to life for more than a couple sweeping vistas.

But all that said, Sense and Sensibility is a terrific accomplishment that stands head and shoulders above most of the material I've covered in this marathon, especially among the adaptations that are actually set in the period. It was rightfully nominated for Best Picture, and while it should have lost to Babe, it shouldn't have lost to Braveheart, and we would all do well to remember that.

TL;DR: Sense and Sensibility is an adaptation that does great wonders in bringing Austen's humor and characters to life, even if it doesn't do the same with her passion.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1005

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)

Census Bloodbath: Etruscan Raiders

Year: 1982
Director: Sergio Martino
Cast: Elvire Audray, Paolo Malco, Claudio Cassinelli
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

The Italian giallo genre was in pretty dire straits by the time the Americans picked up the reins of hacking and slashing in the early 80's. While the countrymen still had some juice left in them (we were still five years off from Michele Soavi's delightful StageFright: Aquarius), post-Friday the 13th Italy had mostly produced forgotten dreck from clean-up hitters like Gianni Martucci's Trhauma and Riccardo Freda's Murder Syndrome, or unrepentantly nasty permutations from more well known shlock directors like Ovidio G. Assonitis' Madhouse and Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper.

When Sergio Martino (the director of Your Vice is a Locked Room, and Only I Have the Key, which is actually almost as good as its title) jumped into the fray in 1982 with The Scorpion with the Two Tails, I hoped he would bring some of his 70's bravado to deliver something the was at least stylish and watchable.

And as usual, my hopes were gutted with a butcher knife.

The Scorpion with Two Tails begins, as so many Italian genre riffs do, in New York City, where Joan Barnard (Elvire Audray) learns of the death of her archaeologist husband Arthur (the John Saxon), who recently discovered the ruins of an Etruscan tomb in Italy. She flies to Italy to attempt to solve his murder, bringing her friend Mike (Paolo Malco of The New York Ripper) along with her.

There she gets mixed up with a variety of colorful persons, including a mysterious Contessa (Marilù Tolo) who was housing Arthur, a rival archaeologist named Paolo (Claudio Cassinelli), and a troop of mafiosos/grave robbers/nude photographers who it turns out were engaged in illegal drug trade with Joan's father. She has lots of dreams about Etruscan rituals involving the tomb, and her increasing hysteria would led us to conclude that she is most likely a reincarnation of an immortal ancient priestess.

This has almost nothing to do with the plot, but it's what we spend at least 60% of the movie focusing on, so it's probably worth mentioning.

The supernatural genre elements here are pretty, well, generic. Usually with a plot like this, the Italians have to rely on their lurid stylistic sensibility and sensational murders to goose things up a bit. Unfortunately, the one factor that makes The Scorpion with Two Tails unusual also ruins any chance it had to be interesting: it was originally produced for television (conflicting reports say either a TV movie or a miniseries that was chopped into feature length). I can't say I'm intimately familiar with the broadcast standards of Italian television in the 80's, but it seems to have been pretty comparable to the U.S., considering every ounce of the requisite blood or lurid sexuality of the giallo has been removed from this movie.

As you'll see at the bottom of this review, Scorpion has an unusually huge body count, but more than fifty percent of the kills use the exact same M.O. (twisting someone's head around backward, sometimes in a cool special effect but mostly offscreen), and the ones that don't all take place in the flurry of a two minute shootout. It's boring is what it is, and robbing a giallo of its slasher elements removes any reason to be interested in talking about it. The plot certainly doesn't step up to the plate, because it really deeply concerns itself with having the characters search for a crate of drugs they already found earlier in the movie.

All that we're left with is a heaping helping of overbaked giallo dialogue, a bunch of dreams where random things are covered in maggots, and Mike being a lecherous drag chasing after a woman so recently widowed there's still a chalk outline on the floor.

Maybe it would have been more interesting if John Saxon hadn't departed the movie after five minutes.

Warning: SPOILERS abound for the remainder of the review, not that you should watch this movie anyway. 

Our lead isn't particularly fun to spend time with either. Even though she is revealed to be an immortal Etruscan priestess, she still spends all of her time shrieking and fainting and being incapable of doing anything but wait for her narrative to be pushed forward by a man. A character this doe-eyed and helpless would be irritating under any circumstances, but especially when she's explicitly magical. Call up a swarm of rats to devour your enemies or something. Anything!

There are only two things I liked about this 94 minute gauntlet called a motion picture. First, the production design of the ancient tombs was actually pretty good, avoiding any fakey, obviously foam rocks or anything. Every chamber felt appropriately dusty, weighty, and old.

The second is that the final five minutes go absolutely batshit, with the out of the blue proposal that the true treasure of the tomb is an antimatter diamond surrounded by an antigravity force field that controls the balance of the universe, a fact which introduces no conflict whatsoever because the killer's neck is summarily snapped anyway. Oh, and also Mike was undercover for the DEA and faked his own death, but now they're in love. It's a whole thing.

If the movie had been operating at this wild telenovela register the whole time, it might have been a 10/10, but as it stands I had to sift through cubic kilometers of packing peanuts to find anything worth caring about in this empty shipping crate of a movie.

Killer: Paolo (Claudio Cassinelli)
Final Girl: Joan Barnard (Elvire Audray)
Best Kill: All the kills are exactly the same, so I'm just gonna have to go with the John Saxon one for the novelty of him being Janet Leigh-ed early on in the movie.
Sign of the Times: The ancient Etruscans apparently shopped for makeup at Bonnie Tyler's local drug store.
Scariest Moment: Mike's corpse starts walking, with its head still turned around backward.
Weirdest Moment: Anti-matter diamond, motherfuckers!
Champion Dialogue: "I certainly wouldn't talk in Etruscan to you at night."
Body Count: 17; but it certainly doesn't feel like it - I included deaths that occur in dreams that are most likely flashbacks to another life.

1. Husband has his neck snapped in a dream.
2. Wife has her neck snapped in a dream.
3. Woman #1 has her neck snapped in a dream.
4. Woman #2 has her neck snapped in a dream.
5. Arthur has his head turned around backward.
6. Mr. Forte has his head turned around backward offscreen.
7. Old Man has his head turned around backward offscreen.
8. Eva has her neck snapped.
9. Joan's Dad is shot.
10. Contessa is shot.
11. Security Goon #1 is shot.
12. Security Goon #2 is shot.
13. Mafioso #1 is shot.
14. Mafioso #2 is hit with a falling rock.
15. Mafioso #3 is hit with a falling rock.
16. Anducci hangs himself.
17. Paolo has his neck snapped.

TL;DR: The Scorpion with Two Tails is an exceptionally dull giallo that doesn't even muster the energy to compete with its American slasher counterparts.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1177

Census Bloodbath: Sex And The Single Monster

Year: 1982

Director: John Hough

Cast: John Cassavetes, John Ireland, Kerrie Keane 

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I've been so deep into this slasher movie marathon for so long that I've started to recognize names that wouldn't be uttered in anybody's household from here to Timbuktu. Regardless, John Hough is the reason I was excited to pop in The Incubus, because he directed the low budget 1988 gem American Gothic, a film I've been happy to wave the banner for on many an occasion. Pair that with some cool, eerie poster artwork and you've got me on the hook.

Unfortunately, the lesson I consistently fail to learn during this project is that a poster is not a movie. Even though every single poster, alternates and all, for The Incubus is a drop dead gorgeous specimen (to the point that I could populate this entire review just with different posters - and I will), none of that visual firepower is enough to make a movie worth sitting through for 93 minutes. But more on that in a sec.

First, we must witness this poster that makes the movie look like some sort of heavy metal album cover was adapted into a paperback novel.

Observe the small town of Galen, which is being beset by a terrible tragedy. Local women are being raped so violently that their uteruses are exploding (oh, the 80's, a time when somebody thought this would be a super cool plot hook). Town doctor/autopsist/creepy old man Sam Cordell (John Cassavetes) has been working with the cops to solve the murders, but waiting for the only survivor Mandy (Mitch Martin) to regain the ability to speak is taking too long. Also he needs time to himself to reminisce about his 18-year-old second wife who died under mysterious circumstances.

Sam's daughter Jenny (Erin Flannery) keeps ignoring his orders to stay inside to visit her loser boyfriend Tim (Duncan McIntosh of the same year's Murder by Phone - stay tuned) who keeps having terrible dreams about a woman tied up in a dungeon every time there's a new attack. also on the case is intrepid reporter Laura Kincaid (Kerrie Keane), who strikes up a gross flirtation with Sam despite their age difference appearing to be a flat fifty years. Anyway, it's pretty clear these attacks are supernatural. 

Even though the word "incubus" isn't spoken for about 75 minutes, we the audience know the title of the fucking movie we came to see, so it's not entirely shocking that there's a penis demon wandering around town. But who is the one channeling his presence? Tim? His creepy grandmother Agatha (Helen Hughes of Visiting Hours)? Or someone else from this small town with a population huge enough to host midday concerts in packed movie houses?

Or perhaps it's this sexy demon haunting some heroine from an 18th century gothic novel...

Full disclosure: the effects which bring the titular Incubus to life are really really good. Fuller disclosure: You get to see them for a full ten seconds in this 93 minute movie. Hope you brought your camera! I'd say a picture would last longer, but then again almost anything would. 

So what are we left with for those remaining 5,570 seconds? A pretty miserable slog, to be honest. The Incubus has all the gritty, grotesque flavor of a mid-70's grindhouse exploitation epic, but it's too demure to fully commit to its hog wild concept. Not that I want the endless rapes to be onscreen. In fact, I am tremendously glad all I had to suffer through was a little slow motion screaming, and not a relentless slew of sex crimes like Don't Answer the Phone. But the fact remains that this movie is by design a story about sex, violence, and a monster, and it features almost none of those things.

To be fair, the rest of the things it's about aren't achieved particularly well either. As a mystery with a mounting body count, The Incubus is extraordinarily messy, forgetting to show us scenes about suspects, non-Cassavetes characters, and especially victims until they suddenly are jolted awake and thrown into play way too late in the game. One victim, a docent at the town museum, we meet in the very scene where she dies with about two lines of dialogue. About twenty minutes later Cassavetes randomly drops a line about this woman being his wife's cousin. About fifteen minutes after that, we learn her name. Tell me, how am I supposed to care about following a mystery that can't even follow itself? All this builds up into a tedious double parlor room sequence that spends fifteen minutes in two locations to establish that yes, there's an incubus, and then cuts to credits before anything actually happens.

And don't even get me started on the bizarre subplot about Laura Kincaid being a doppelgänger for Sam's dead second wife, which immediately leaps out the window and is never heard from again.

This beautiful poster is just mocking me at this point.

At the very least, The Incubus makes some swings toward atmosphere that occasionally connect. The score is a creepy atmospheric blanket over the whole thing, and the decision to run the opening credits over a shot that slowly zooms out to reveal a human eye is pretty stylish. And the decision to mount a camera under a character's wheelchair as she zooms around is... odd, but at least creative. Unfortunately, the editing takes a bit of a beating, presenting events in a bizarre kaleidoscope of smash cuts. 

But with a script that's this much of a shambles, even if it was perfectly cut together it would still seem completely random and aggrieved, as if individual parts of each scene want nothing to do with one another. So the redeeming qualities available to us here are limited. I didn't hate the experience of sitting through this movie, but I could have been staring at a blank screen for an hour and a half and edified myself to the exact same degree.

Killer: The Incubus [as embodied by Laura Kincaid (Kerrie Keane)]

Final Girl: Sam Cordell (John Cassavetes)

Sign of the Times: Every time a character turns on a radio, out screeches hair metal so terrible that I don't even want to put it on my slasher movie music playlist, which includes some real dreadful shit.

Best Kill: In one of the only sequences that betrays its slasher roots, the shotgun-toting patriarch of a farming family follows the demon into a barn, where he is stabbed in the neck with a shovel, then blows his own foot off in shock.

Scariest Moment: John Cassavetes tells his 18-year-old daughter Jenny, "you are my queen, my morning..."

Weirdest Moment: A scene opens with a cat chilling on a porch, then the paper boy hits it square in the face with the daily news.

Champion Dialogue: "Will you get out of here? I don't have time for idiots."

Body Count: 8

1. Roy is hit in the face with a board with a nail in it.
2. Caroline is Incubus'd.
3. Chip the Dog is impaled with a pitchfork.
4. Ernie is stabbed in the neck with a shovel.
5. Jane is Incubus'd.
6. Jane's Sister in a Wheelchair is killed offscreen.
7. Concert Girl is Incubus'd.
8. [Jenny is Incubus'd.]

TL;DR: The Incubus is at least uncompromising, but is both icky and a little bit dull.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1236