I recently saw The meaning of life for $9.99 which is based on several short stories by Etgar Keret, who was also the co-screenwriter. It's a stop motion animation film where several of his stories are arranged as to take place in a big apartment building. The movie reminded me how much I admire his writing. I find him (post) to definitely be among the great short story writers in literature, at the level of O Henry and company. I can also see his stories being read a century from now. I also found his debut as a film director in Jelly fish (meduzot) very impessive. It is rare to see such an impressive debut.
I very much enjoyed the movie and it is beautiful to watch. But one issue bothered me and I wanted to pass on an understanding I had from the movie. If you think of composers, there are those who  almost any interpreter sounds good playing, and there are those who you need an extremely good one to make sense of. For the first kind, Verdi comes to mind, and for the second perhaps Mozart. Writers are also divided like that, and as a writer Keret is of the second kind. It is very easy for his stories to lose their sense, and it takes the slightest lack of precision for it to happen. When you write you have full control on everything, but in movies that is rarely the case and the moment you give up control things can  lose their precision and direction.   

The film doesn't have to follow Keret's meaning and could have a sense of its own, which is what this film does. It has its unique tone and feeling. It is definitely coherent as far as tone goes, but if it gained in some areas it also lost with regards sense.

The film is extremely well made I definietly recommend to people  to go see it.



(For a complicated example about what I mean about losing sense I can mention his relation to metaphor, which I'll perhaps try to develop in a seperate post at some point. Keret has a unique kind of writing which somehow manages to inhibit a simple reading of his stories as metaphors but demand you stay in his created universe).