Word: fiction
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...surprise here. The director's four or five previous features - Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and the Kill Bill tandem - paid elaborate homage to, and ran elegant twists on, action films by otherwise-forgotten journeymen who were in no recognized sense auteurs; they were no-teurs. That's been a tonic corrective to the received wisdom about films: that, yes, there are still pearls worth diving for; you just have to look in ranker, more roiled waters. Hence, Vanishing Point's Richard Sarafian, and John Hough of Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, and a true indie daredevil, H.B. Halicki...
...their state's martial heritage. For all his imaginative pyrotechnics, Keret's aim is engage his reader with the everyday oddness of Israel. "I would call it subjective realism," he says of his bizarre storylines. "I am trying to show things the way they feel." Overwhelmingly, in Keret's fiction, things feel edgy. Throughout Missing Kissinger, there is the sense of the dark slap-shtick of a country where, through dumb luck, a coffee in the wrong café could spell death by suicide bomber...
...quick-fix fiction has won Keret plaudits and fame. Missing Kissinger, his breakthrough book, came out in 1994 (published in the U.K. and the U.S. this March, most of the stories here appear for the first time in English). It was chosen as one of the 50 most important works in Hebrew by the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, and is on the Israeli high school syllabus. Keret now pens caustic satirical sketches for Israeli TV, has published a series of comic books and won Israel's equivalent of a Best Picture Oscar for Skin Deep, a movie he co-directed...
...political stance - more accurately, the absence of an explicit ideology in his fiction - has led to clashes with Israel's literary grandees. "I'm a very political writer," he says. "But my idea of politics is different from the previous generation's. When people say that I am not political, they mean that my stories don't have a political bottom line...
...star and his audience. That's Ferrell's main achievement during this hot run of his. Since his first smash, the 2003 Elf (still his highest grosser), he has kept busy and lucky: building a succession of hits, dabbling in the higher-IQ type of comedy (Stranger Than Fiction), cameoing in his friends' films, occasionally lending his luster to indies nobody sees. One of these, Winter Passing, grossed all of $101,228. But that's just pro bono work; these small flops don't taint him. The films Ferrell has starred in have grossed $876,885,086 at the North...