EK News

Peter Hartlaub, SF Chronicle Pop Culture Critic on "$9.99"

2009-07-10T11:29:23Z

"$9.99" has a broad appeal, but fans of quality low-tech animation are going to be blown away.

"The Girl on the Fridge" nominated for Shirley Jackson award

2009-06-28T07:46:16Z

Nominees Announced for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Awards

COLLECTION
A Better Angel, Chris Adrian (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser (Knopf)
The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa (Picador)
The Girl on the Fridge, Etgar Keret (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Just After Sunset, Stephen King (Scribner)Wild Nights!, Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)

More about the Shirley Jackson awards for "outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic" at wikipedia

$9.99 showtimes

2009-06-26T18:35:03Z

$9.99 show times (click icons to enlarge)

Source: $9.99 site

$9.99 reviews by Washington Times and Boston.com

2009-06-26T18:01:23Z

More $9.99 reviews

Washington Times

"There was some talk at the end of last year about "$9.99" emerging as a dark-horse candidate in the animated-feature category at the Academy Awards. Though that never materialized, such rumors are a testament to the caliber of the film and the subjects it broaches."

The Boston Globe

"The result of [Keret's] screenwriting collaboration with Rosenthal is a movie that entertains and enlightens without being preachy - in fact, most of its beliefs are strenuously ambiguous; that's a key part of the joke."

Time-Out new york interview with Etgar Keret

2009-06-19T11:17:12Z

Time Out New York interviews Keret about $9.99

... Why are people always looking for easy answers to unanswerable questions?
I think the film isn't about people looking for easy answers as much as it is the fact that people gave up on looking. Because I think that sometimes the yearning and the search is some sort of a meaning. And the difference between the character who wants to order the meaning of life and the other people around him is that you can say he's naive and unrealistic, but he didn't give up. He's obsessed with this question. The other people are already executing their plan Bs and Cs - they've already given up on whatever they once believed in ...

Reviews of $9.99: Entertainment Weekly, Village Voice, NJ.com and NYT

2009-06-19T11:04:20Z

Here are some USA reviews of $9.99

Entertainment Weekly

The investment is worth it for a movie ticket to an original universe of characters in search of contentment

Village voice

Etgar Keret is sometimes described as Israel's Woody Allen, but this hugely popular humorist is more fanciful and morbid in his evocation of cultural schlemielery. Co-written with Keret, Tatia Rosenthal's stop-motion animation $9.99 adds a measure of creepiness to Keret's dark whimsy.

NJ.com

Rosenthal gives the entire production a lovely, fine-art look, and a real feeling that we're looking at life as it's lived - even if there are angels involved, and everyone is made of modeling clay. How often do you see that even in live-action films?

NY Times

The Israeli writer Etgar Keret possesses an imagination not easily slotted into conventional literary categories. His very short stories might be described as Kafkaesque parables, magic-realist knock-knock jokes or sad kernels of cracked cosmic wisdom. When such vignettes are strung together into a feature — as in “Jellyfish” (2007), which he directed with his wife, Shira Geffen, and now in Tatia Rosenthal’s “$9.99” — they become even more elusive and strange.

Haaretz newspaper sends Etgar Keret to interview Ehud Barak

2009-06-10T06:44:27Z

Keret interviews Israeli minister of defense Ehud Barak

You know there is a never-ending debate over the question of whether Netanyahu has really changed. What is your opinion?
Barak gave vent to a morose sigh, like those he attached in his speech to the word "opportunity," and then continued with a warm smile, almost heartwarming.
"Tell me," he said, "have you changed?"

Times online recommends Kneller's Happy Campers

2009-05-23T12:51:32Z

Books: In short - Times Online

"[Kneller's Happy Campers] is like nothing else"

"This American Life" - May 22nd

2009-05-20T19:23:39Z

Story by Keret on next episode of This American Life - May 22^nd

Actor Matt Malloy reads "Shoes" by Etgar Keret, about a boy who betrays his people with a pair of shoes on the radio show "This American Life".

$9.99 screening at MoMa and Lincoln Center

2009-03-20T06:15:44Z

The Film Society of Lincoln Center Presents - $9.99

March 29th - 7pm, Museum of Modern Art, Titus Theater 1
April 1st - 9pm, Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center

Christopher Bowen's Moving Picture Music

2009-03-10T10:13:46Z

Christopher Bowen composed the soundtracks for both Jellyfish and $9.99.
His site contains sound-bites from both, and more.

NYTimes: Dinner companions

2009-03-10T10:05:17Z

Keret [among others] recommends a book/food combo to NY Times

The last time I reread Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" was during the Lebanon war. The other night, in the middle of the Gaza bombing, I was reading it again in a Chinese restaurant here in Tel Aviv. I started laughing and crying, which goes with sweet and sour.

The Albany schedule

2009-03-07T11:04:20Z

Etgar Keret Visits Albany On March 16 , 2009

March 13, 2009
7:30pm, Page Hall, 140 Western Avenue, Albany:
The New York State Writers Institute will show Keret's film "Wristcutters: A Love Story".
March 16, 2009
4pm, Uptown Campus, University at Albany, Campus Center 375:
Keret will read from his fiction, answer questions, and sign copies of his books (both Hebrew and
English versions), available for sale.
6:45pm, Spectrum 8 Theatres, 290 Delaware Avenue, Albany:
Jellyfish: film screening followed by Q & A session with Etgar Keret. (Tickets $8.50. Students
advanced booking discount $6.75).

Kerrett about "The weapons and matchstick museum"

2009-02-07T07:25:50Z

Matchstick War - Meeting a Childhood Friend During Missile Strikes in Israel, Again - NYTimes.com

He explained to us that the museum had originally been devoted to weapons alone, but after he was convicted of stealing grenades for the exhibition, he took advantage of his eight-month sentence to build the Eiffel Tower and the guitar and added them to the collection

Keret's nextbook Op-Ed about Gaza

2009-01-09T08:05:30Z

Nextbook: Etgar Keret: Money Pit

"... There are only a few winners in this conflict, and I'm one of them. Here, look." He pushed his BlackBerry at me. "Oil options went up seven dollars. I'm the man. And maybe you too can come out of this thing with a few shekels from some op-ed piece ..."

Keret's LA Times Op Ed about Gaza

2009-01-09T08:03:54Z

Middle East 'proportionality' - Etgar Keret - Los Angeles Times

Early in the aerial bombing of Gaza, five young girls from the same family were killed, and many more children have died on both sides of the border in recent years. The attempt to introduce their bodies into an equation that would make their deaths justifiable or comprehensible might be necessary to influence current events, but it is still enraging

Audio (streaming and MP3): 4 short stories by Etgar Keret and others

2009-01-04T13:43:46Z

Public Radio International | Family Matters

On this hour of "Selected Shorts": Four stories about families and children by classic and contemporary writers ... Israeli writer Etgar Keret's "Pride and Joy," in which a childhood prodigy takes a toll on his parents. The reader is Tony Award- winner Robert Sean Leonard. From: "The Nimrod Flipout" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

This audio recording also features stories by Shirley Jackson, Jeanne Dixon, and Rick Moody (read by Lois Smith, Mia Dillon, and B.D. Wong)

$9.99 makes it to the 2008 LA Weekly top 10 movies

2009-01-02T02:24:52Z

Los Angeles Film TV - Best Movies of 2008: Great Expectations - LA Weekly

10. $9.99 This has to be the first year that three animated movies make it into my top 10, but "animated" is an elastic definition that also covers the stop-go figures in Tatia Rosenthal%u2019s feature debut, which transposes short stories by po-mo Israeli writer Etgar Keret into a Sydney apartment building filled with lost souls looking for fulfillment, parental attention or just sexual bliss with a smooth-skinned man. Like Keret's stories, $9.99 hovers dangerously around whimsy, then veers into the depths of benighted souls, and bestows on them the moments of grace that may be the best we can hope for. Unless, of course, you're Poppy.

"The Girl on the Fridge" picked by January Magazine's as one of 2008's best

2008-12-28T21:23:53Z

January Magazine: Best Books of 2008: Fiction

Writers have a particular challenge when trying to create believable plot and characters in stories which typically range from just a few sentences to a few pages. How do you reduce a universe of meaning to something the size of a breadbox? Etgar Keret makes it look so easy

Reuters - $9.99 review

2008-12-20T09:23:34Z

Animated oddity $9.99 great value for money | Reuters

The stop-action animated film tackles the magically realist, existential short stories of Israeli author-filmmaker Etgar Keret. In fact, it's hard to think of another way to put these stories onscreen other than animation as each becomes increasingly surreal.

AWN interviews Tatia Rosenthal

2008-12-20T09:22:16Z

Animation World Magazine - interview with Tatia Rosenthal

Tatia Rosenthal tells Joe Strike about her journey to make Etgar Keret's $9.99 into a stop-motion feature, which links Israel, the U.S. and Australia

This year - Keret teaches at Sundance Screenwriting Lab

2008-12-20T09:16:12Z

Sundance fills Screenwriting Lab - Entertainment News, Film News, Media - Variety

The lab will offer screenwriters the opportunity to work on their feature film scripts with support from established writers and creative advisors including Lab Artistic Director Scott Frank, Marcos Bernstein, Naomi Foner, Nelson George, Michael Goldenberg, Deena Goldstone, Erik Jendresen, Etgar Keret, Kasi Lemmons, Doug McGrath, Walter Mosley, Ron Nyswaner, Tom Rickman, Susan Shilliday, Zach Sklar, Dana Stevens and Bill Wheeler.

Trailer for $9.99 at LA Times

2008-12-02T23:32:58Z

Los Angeles Times exclusive: Trailer for '$9.99'

... On Dec. 12, "$9.99," a beautiful stop-motion animated film by Israeli filmmaker Tatia Rosenthal, will be released in American theaters, having already played to great acclaim at the Toronto and Rome film festivals. As you can get a sense from the trailer for "$9.99," which is debuting exclusively on this blog, the film is a bit of an existentialist, surrealist story - an animated "Synecdoche, New York," if you will - that was weaved together from several short stories by revered Israeli writer Etgar Keret (who himself co-won Cannes' Camera d'Or last year for the Israeli film "Meduzot") ...

$9.99 got nominated for the Annie Award

2008-12-02T02:04:16Z

36th Annual Annie Award Nominations Announced - SmartBrief

... "Kung Fu Panda" leads the field with 17 nominations ... "Bolt" received 9 nominations ... "Wall-E" received 8 nominations ... Completing the Best Animated Feature category is Sony Pictures Classics "Waltz With Bashir" and Sherman Pictures/Lama Films "$9.99"

$9.99 official site and release date

2008-11-15T06:33:00Z

$9.99 release date (limited): 12^th of December 2008
More at the Official $9.99 site