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It's Kind of a Funny Story

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.

Jack Goes Boating

I would see just about anything that featured Philip Seymour Hoffman, even at the risk of sitting through another Patch Adams (and notice I had to go back 12 years to find a true stinker in his credits). That enough other people feel the same way is the reason we have Jack Goes Boating, a theater adaption about characters depicted in a fashion that wouldn’t normally be expected to lure movie audiences.



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