Not chick lit: DahliaWe’ll admit this is a totally loaded question. The Book of Dahlia, perhaps the funniest cancer story ever written, is a novel by Jewcy editor-at-large Elisa Albert. You’ve probably seen her on the site, writing about In Treatment, vegetarianism, or the underexplored relationship between Martin Buber and Legally Blond.

Elisa is really, really good at understanding human nature and really, really bad at avoiding controversy. One of the short stories in her first book, How This Night Is Different, explores the age-old question “What happens if it’s Passover and you’re Jewish and you have a yeast infection?” Dahlia, meanwhile, looks at the life of a privileged half-Israeli Beverly Hills kid whose quarterlife crisis is radically compounded by terminal brain cancer. Naturally, because it’s funny and the main character is a girl, the publisher slapped a pink cover on it, but I promise boys will like it too. Me, I found it challenging and tragic and impossible to put down, but I couldn’t be more biased, so let’s see what critics who haven’t ever been to Elisa’s house for Shabbat dinner have to say.

The New Yorker calls Dahlia “one of the most likable characters in recent fiction.” The LA Times is less enthusiastic, calling the novel “a story that somehow feels mushy” but adding that it rallies as Dahlia gets sicker, ultimately coming to “a sweet and poignant close.”

And The San Francisco Chronicle is just in love:

The Book of Dahlia may sound unbearably sad, and it can be, but it's also very funny, filled with scathing criticisms and lyrical bursts of profanity. Often, the humor and sadness are so tightly entwined as to be nearly indistinguishable. Dahlia's father, for instance, insists on optimistic misinterpretations of doctors' words: "Not worst possible place, not necessarily worst possible tumor, he jotted in his notebook while the head of Neurology went on to explain that it actually was the 'worst possible' tumor."

I was expecting the Jewish press to treat Elisa as a sort of prodigal daughter, but they were just as excited about the book. At the Forward, Melanie Weiss thinks Dahlia’s character flaws—and she has many—ultimately make the novel succeed:

Our intimacy with her flaws makes us care about her, and her story, and her deeply human responses to any number of really tough scenarios. As Dahlia’s physical condition deteriorates, we are very much there, and it’s a remarkably affecting read. That appears to be Albert’s particular genius: She cultivates an emotional bond even with her heroine, not despite Dahlia’s human defects but because of them.

Sarah Weinman at Jbooks.com looks at the most complicated, least sentimental part of what's ultimately a pretty complicated and unsentimental novel:

The most fractious relationship Dahlia has, and thus the most pivotal one Albert depicts, is with her brother Danny, a prominent young Manhattan rabbi. Here is a painful portrait of a younger sister's hero worship slowly evolving into contempt as a result of her brother's lousy and cruel treatment. Other works would put a shiny bow and have Danny and Dahlia arrive at a heart-tugging reconciliation before her untimely death. Albert knows better.

Haaretz is less enchanted with Danny’s role, calling him “the one fault of Albert's otherwise fine, nuanced novel.” But like everyone else, they're bursting with praise, though they do note—somewhat chauvinistically?—that Dahlia might have been happier in Israel.

Oscar season has come and gone, leaving behind a list of winners, a few great catchphrases (“your eggo is preggo”… um, and something about milkshakes), and people like me with an even longer list of movies to see this winter (thanks a lot, academy.) As was reported by Jewcy, this year’s best foreign film award went to legitimately good and simultaneously Jewish film, The Counterfeiters, hailing from Austria. What you might not know is that Brazil’s submission to this Oscar category, the un-nominated O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Féria (“The Year My Parents Went on Vacation”) is also creating a little bit of buzz these days in the realm of Jewish media.

The film was released over a year ago in Brazil before making appearances at film festivals abroad in 2007, including at Cannes and Tribeca. It even picked up a few awards. It has been shown in limited screenings in the US since last month. But the question remains: is it actually any good?The Year My Parents Went on Vacation: I can't believe my parents are dumping me at grandpa's house.

Set in 1970’s Brazil, “The Year My Parents Went on Vacation” is the story of Mauro, a Brazilian pre-teen who is too distracted by Pelé and Brazil’s World Cup campaign to understand the turmoil taking place in his country under its military dictatorship. When his parents, members of the left-wing resistance movement, are forced to go into hiding, they deliver little Mauro into the care of his grandfather under the pretense that they are going on vacation. But their intended plans go awry, and Mauro is transferred into the care of his grumpy, yet kind hearted neighbor, Shlomo, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe and active member of his neighborhood’s Orthodox community. Mauro and Shlomo end up forming a unique friendship, learning about each other’s cultures and about themselves.

It’s a familiar sort of story. Maybe too familiar, according to New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott. Although he believes the movie to be “charming,” Scott feels that audiences have heard this story before. Luckily, its likability is able to transcend the plot’s tiredness at times. Writes Scott:

“The Year My Parents Went on Vacation” is most seductive when it focuses on the details of daily life in the lower-middle-class São Paulo neighborhood Bom Retiro. The rhythms of commerce, worship and domesticity — the sounds of apartment house courtyards, synagogues and shops — frequently overshadow what turns out to be a fairly conventional and sentimental story. Though the milieu is, for most viewers, novel, the emotional elements of the film, to say nothing of its characters, are reassuringly if also somewhat disappointingly familiar.

Jan Stuart of Newsday agrees, saying that in certain parts of the film there “contains a glimmer of a great movie wanting to break out.”

On the other hand, the Forward loves this movie, calling it “a Jewish cinema gem.” One bit of insight that reviewer Elissa Strauss adds to the previous reviews is that although the film drags at times, it is not because it is filled with boring Jewish stereotypes.

Through this boredom emerges a surprisingly un-exotic portrait of Jewish immigrants. At no point are we bombarded with violins, forced to drool over warm challah or seduced by the flickering flame of a Sabbath candle...As a result, the Brazilian Jews in the film are neither saintly nor suspect. If anything, they are ordinary: They cook, they clean, they work, they sleep. The non-Jewish Brazilians in the movie receive the same treatment, and the characters move beyond the sensuality and violence that usually mark their cinematic portrayals. For both groups, the mundane is rather becoming.

Ol' hatchet-face: Karl Markovics as master criminal Sally Sorowitsch This is a bit of a rhetorical question, since they don’t usually give Oscars to bad movies, but is The Counterfeiters any good? Or, to put it a slightly more opinionated way, is The Counterfeiters Oscar-good, meaning that it’s well-constructed and makes the judges feel nice (like, say, Crash, which I still think was immensely dumb), or is it genuinely worth seeing?

According to both the mainstream press and the Jewish media, it’s the latter. The Counterfeiters tells the story of Sally Sorowitsch, a master forger whose probable death at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp is prevented when the Nazis enlist him to fake British and American money. He clashes with another forger, a leftist named Adolf Burger, who would rather die than help the Third Reich. Which is better, asks the film—to survive through complicity in evil, or to throw your life away and remain morally unsullied?

In the New Yorker, David Denby opines that these questions are tired, but The Counterfeiters makes them “vibrantly new" and Karl Markovics, who plays Sally, does wonderful work with his “hatchet face.” The New York Times agrees, calling the movie “a swift and suspenseful thriller” and, weirdly enough, also referring to Markovic’s “hatchet face.”

The Entertainment Weekly is equally positive but quibbles with the characterization of Markovic’s head:

Without doing anything so divisive as taking sides, The Counterfeiters pays sympathetic attention to those who play their cards to win even when the rules are terrible, not least because the remarkable Markovics, an Austrian TV actor with a pugnacious anvil of a head, is so riveting as an unsaintly survivor.

The Jewish News Weekly of Northern California (jewishsf.com) calls the film “riveting” and has a bunch of great quotes from Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky. My favorite:

“If you show Jews only as flawless victims waiting to be murdered, it’s difficult to relate to these people,” he continued. “The point is that a crook who’s pretty unlikable in the beginning, such a person does not deserve to be killed in a concentration camp [either]. It’s not only about flawless people who shouldn’t be there, but also the not-so-good ones.”

True! And the JTA, noting that Ruzowitzky is the grandson of Nazi sympathizers, thinks that “director-writer Ruzowitzky’s background and motivation is as interesting as the movie itself.”

Only one person has anything less than glowing to say about the movie. According to the real-life Adolf Burger, now 90, the film is accurate, but "the book, of course, has more detail and is grittier." The book? Burger’s memoir, on which the film was based. The man might be a nonagenarian, but he knows his PR.

Previously: Best Foreign Picture Says "Suck It, Nazis"

The rebbe's pugilist: Hassidic boxer Dmitriy Salita is the subject of a new documentaryA lot of Jewish art – books, movies, whatever – is terrible. Of course, a lot of art is terrible, period, and I say this as someone who has never managed to remain dry-eyed through a movie about troubled teens solving their problems through dance. But Jewish cultural products are often marketed and reviewed as if their Jewishness trumps any concerns about quality. The amount of readily available funding in the Jewish community makes the problem immeasurably worse, because even if your idea is half-assed, you’ll probably be able to find someone to spend a lot of money to produce it as long as you mention the J-word. As a result, the bar gets lowered, Jewish culture gets crappified, and people like me give up entirely and go watch Step It Up 2 The Streets.

I don’t think movies, books, or music deserve any kind of free pass just because their ethnic affiliation is my ethnic affiliation, though, so I’m going to start playing compare-and-contrast with reviews. Welcome to “Good, or Just Jewish?” – a weekly look at how mainstream and Jewish papers reviewed the books, movies and music aimed at you because you’re a Jew.

“Orthodox Stance” is a documentary about Lubavitcher boxer Dmitriy Salita, so it seems like perfect Jewish film festival bait. And indeed, it’s traveling the country right now on the festival circuit. But is it any good? Rotten Tomatoes says reviewers gave it an average of 6/10 stars, but they only collected 15 reviews.

Suspiciously, both The Jewish Week and Bangitout avoided reviewing the movie entirely. The former profiled filmmaker Jason Hutt; the latter interviewed Salita after a gushing introduction filled with sentences like:

Salita, based on skill, dedication, and commitment to both boxing and Judaism, makes him someone I feel compelled to support. He is our brother in the truest sense of the word. We share with him the most elemental, eternal bonds that any two people on this planet can share – history and belief. Plus, he is a menace as a prizefighter.

You could be forgiven for a certain skepticism at this point, but the mainstream media mostly seems to agree. The New York Times called the film “intriguingly layered” and The New York Sun says it “quickly outgrows any sensationalist ‘one man-two worlds’ narrative myopia.”

The Onion’s AV Club, on the other hand, gives the film a C. Their justification:

[B]oxing and Orthodox Judaism have more in common than most people imagine. Both rely heavily on faith, traffic in rituals and repetition, and encourage rigid self-discipline and Spartan self-denial. Yet the film never makes this association between seemingly antithetical entities, instead coasting way too heavily on the superficial novelty of a godly man making his living by beating the crap out of strangers.

And Variety says: “Excellent ringside coverage doesn't show much genuine tension, unless keeping kosher in a Puerto Rican hotel room qualifies as high drama.”

The verdict? If you like boxing or movies about faith, you could do worse. But for genuine excitement, if you happen to be in NYC, skip the film and just watch Salita fight in the Roseland Ballroom on February 28.