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Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the writing-directing team responsible for the new comedy-drama It’s Kind of a Funny Story, have admitted that they’re enthusiastic fans of the late John Hughes, creator of such enormously popular teen-spirit 1980s movie comedies as The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This might not seem an obvious affinity, given their first two feature films. The first, Half Nelson, was about a passionately committed high school teacher whose life and career are put in grave jeopardy by a drug addiction. The next, Sugar, followed the difficult story arc of a very young Dominican baseball player who’s recruited by an American team. These two rather dissimilar films shared a sympathetically observational approach to their young protagonists’ struggles.
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