Word: prawer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...open((ing)) your schmucky gob"? Does the world really need another lecherous British officer dithering, "I say, Lorna, I'm terribly keen on you"? At times, with their perfumed dissolutes and frustrated shrinks, the stories read like crude distillations of the Anglo-Indo-American vignettes of screenwriter-novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, or even like bite-size appetizers for the full-course feast of a Salman Rushdie novel...
Directed by James Ivory; Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala...
Arriving in 1961 in India, they persuaded Novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to write their scripts, and Jhabvala, 59, an English-educated German married to an Indian, has worked on almost all their pictures, Maurice being a rare exception. The team's reputation was established with their second film, Shakespeare Wallah. The story of a troupe of English actors traveling across India, the film was made on a budget of $80,000, small even by Indian standards. The modest renown established by that film was nearly lost by a subsequent series of almost perversely maladroit efforts, including The Guru, Bombay Talkie...
...introduction to this selection of 15 stories from four earlier books, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala notes the problem that faces all foreigners who settle on the subcontinent: "To live in India and be at peace, one must to a very considerable extent become Indian and adopt Indian attitudes, habits, beliefs, assume if possible an Indian personality. But how is this possible? And even if it were possible--without cheating oneself--would it be desirable? Should one want to try to become something other than what...
...will ever be tempted to employ terms like that to describe The Bostonians, for Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay is less a response to its source than a careful college outline of it. There is a certain undiminishable power in the struggle between Basil Ransom (Christopher Reeve), all snaky masculine guile, and Olive Chancellor (Vanessa Redgrave), representing feminism at its most sternly ideological, for the innocent soul of Verena Tarrant. But Ivory's camera behaves like a tourist trapped meekly behind a velvet rope at a historical reconstruction, and most of his actors seem afraid they might damage...