"$9.99" Coming to DVD in the USA on February 23, 2010

E1 Entertainment will be releasing $9.99 on DVD on February 23, 2010.

The French version of the "$9.99" DVD is available on amazon.fr

Australian Sunday Morning Herald: Writer plots pathways into puzzle of Israeli life

When Keret presented Jellyfish at Yale University, six Jews in the audience walked out halfway through the screening, screaming that he was an anti-Zionist, self-hating Israeli. Their gripe was a scene in the film that showed a couple that kept having to change from one sleazy Tel Aviv hotel to another. "They thought I was presenting Israel as a shitty country with shitty hotels so no tourists would come here and yelled out that it was no wonder I got French financing for the film because the French hate Jews."

The reverse was true in Italy, where the film was strongly criticised for being anti-Palestinian because it portrayed a Palestinian director who did a bad job of directing a Shakespeare play.

Fairfield County Weekly's Ann Lewinson

Etgar Keret, with "Jellyfish" and "Wristcutters: A Love Story", is fast becoming a favored supplier of quirky plots for indie filmmakers. With the imaginative, intertwining stories in "$9.99", it's easy to see why.

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Star Tribune's Colin Covert reviews "$9.99"

"$9.99" marries the tradition of Jewish self-flagellating humor with uncanny absurdity. The film shows us miracles coexisting with the mundane, a tone of disorienting everyday oddness that is equal parts "Seinfeld," Kafka and Gumby.

Phillly.com $9.99 review: Themes of hope, angst, masterfully molded in clay

Using the medium of Wallace and Gromit and Gumby, Israeli filmmaker Tatia Rosenthal turns her clay figures into real people in $9.99, a wise, wistful study of hope and dread

SFGate:

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

$9.99 show times (click icons to enlarge)



Source: $9.99 site

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."

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.

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 ...

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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") ...

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"

Can $9.99 Get You an Oscar These Days? (Maybe in the Toon Category) - Thompson On Hollywood on Variety.com

$9.99, a stop motion toon for grown-ups, based on the very short stories of Israeli writer Etgar Keret (some of them no longer than a sneeze, but evocative enough to set your imagination running). That might seem like a shortage of material on which to base a feature, but consider that (a) most blockbusters can be reduced to 25 words or less and (b) director Tatia Rosenthal has gathered up a handful of Keret's ideas and packed them into a single film (by making his characters neighbors in a disaster-prone Australian apartment building), and you've got more than enough story to deal with.

indieWIRE: DISPATCH FROM ROME

The best films in the first part of the festival were small films that more than delivered because they never pretend to be anything there are not. ... Equally enchanting is the Israeli-Australian animated film "$9.99" from director Tatia Rosenthal. The film uses stop-motion animation to tell the stories of a very heterogeneous group of people who all live in the same apartment building in Sydney. The screenplay by Etgar Keret and the director strikes just the right balance between quirk and simple observation, making the animated characters all lovable but flawed human beings. Geoffrey Rush's contribution as the voice of a character who might be an angel is especially noteworthy.

New DVDs - washingtonpost.com

"[Jellyfish] provides a diverting portrait of modern-day Israel, as the filmmakers eschew history, politics and religion to focus instead on more intimate and universal issues of fate, loss and the longing to connect."

IFC.com DVD review of "Jellyfish"

Confident enough to simply suggest the fantastical and never nail it down, and nervy enough to quote Jean Vigo's "L'Atalante" in the end, "Jellyfish" is rich with motifs and mysteries, and displays a sweet, patient personality.

This, of course, implies that the DVD is available :)