Word: efron
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...Again - the film is a body-swap comedy about a sour guy in his 30s (Matthew Perry) who gets to inhabit his cool teenage self (Efron) - could be the title of the young star's career. As basketball stud and dance master Troy Bolton, he headlined three editions of Disney's High School Musical: two wildly popular TV specials and a movie version that earned $251 million at the world box office. He also co-starred in the hit film Hairspray, a savvier, '60s high school musical...
...though he's now of legal drinking age, Efron is 17 again. Not that it's a stretch for him to play someone four years younger. He still has the mop top, the downy skin and the sensuous sanctity of the boy every mother wants her daughter to bring home - if he weren't dating his dimpled co-star from High School Musical, Vanessa Hudgens. He could be the perfect perpetual adolescent. It's as if everyone wants him to be 17 forever. (See pictures of famous couples...
Everyone but Efron, that is. By now he's restless with being the pinup boy on Brownies' bedroom walls. He's turned down a remake of Footloose, the '80s high school musical, to free up time for more mature films. "I'm ready for new challenges," Efron told Cindy Pearlman of the Chicago Sun-Times. "I want to act and do serious roles." (He's already made an indie film, Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles, in which he plays a struggling actor who's ... 17.) But how to make the transition? Does he carry the tweens into their...
...Mike O'Donnell is his high school's star point guard. (It is the persistent delusion of Efron movies that a 5-ft. 9-in. white kid would be coveted by college scouts - for the basketball team, not the drama department.) As the big game begins, Mike learns from his girlfriend Scarlet that she is pregnant. Stunned, he leaves the court, feeling his duty is his destiny. Flash-forward 20 years and the cheers have faded. Mike (Perry) has lost his job; Scarlet (Leslie Mann) has told him she wants a divorce; his teenage kids, son Alex (Sterling Knight...
...body-switch parables Peggy Sue Got Married and Big in ways that are by turns perplexing, annoying and endearing, 17 Again has lessons in tow: that kids will take fatherly advice only from another teen, that a life full of compromises and defeats is still worth cherishing and that Efron can nail a tearful public declaration of hopeless love with the assurance of a young Tom Hanks. He said he wanted to act, and now he has - pretty well...