Very loosely based on Far From the Madding Crowd, Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe is Thomas Hardy twice-filtered: first through the skeptical-sympathetic eye of the terrific British graphic novelist Posy Simmonds, who specializes in placing a contemporary spin on literary classics --
A suicidal teenager helps heal his fellow mental patients in It's Kind of a Funny Story, an unexpectedly light tale from Half Nelson writer-directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden.
On paper, Stone looks like a dream for fans of acting heavyweights facing off against each another. In one corner, there's Robert De Niro, playing Jack, a parole officer just a few weeks short of his retirement.
A few weeks ago, an NPR coworker brought Frank James and me some SunChips.The bag they came in -- which is "100 percent compostable" and made from plant products, apparently -- was big and shiny and, when we dared to touch it, noisy. Really noisy, actually.
