JonCryer Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I'm spoiled. As a kid, I woke up with Beanie and Cecil and Rocky and Bullwinkle, gobbled down Looney Tunes, Merry Melodies, Speed Racer and Gigantor after school, and passed the early evening hours with The Flintstones and The Jetsons. Even as an uneducated child, I knew the ones with replay value and the ones that quickly grew tiresome. As an adult, I know the ones that still hold up and the ones that make me embarrassed to admit I ever watched them.

That brings me in a roundabout way to Robert Rodriguez' new, live-action film Shorts. Funny, inventive, and very, very clever in micro-bursts of six to eight seconds, Shorts becomes tiresome over the length of its 89-minute running time. I couldn't shake the feeling that it would have been better-suited as a weekly television show, chopped up into brief segments with plenty of commercial breaks in between. Shorts could just as easily have been called "Six Short Sketches in Search of a Synopsis," but then the title would be longer than its attention span.

Aimed squarely at kids, Shorts may, perhaps, please the modern sensibility of today's sub-teens, but I suspect the well has run dry for Rodriguez and family films. The Spy Kids franchise devolved in entertainment value from the first installment to the third, and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl was an unfortunate mess. Rodriguez has built a cottage industry based on a scattershot approach to filmmaking. He's always been a "shoot [film] first, ask [narrative] questions later" kind of director / writer / photographer / editor / composer / visual effects artist. That doesn't serve him well with Shorts.

After Manure quietly (and not-so-quietly) stunk up the scene at the Sundance Film Festival, the Polish Brothers (Mark and Michael) have returned to the festival circuit with Stay Cool -- a film that leaps into your lap with its perky, original concept, but then slowly but surely fails to deliver ... well, pretty much everything. What we have here is an on-the-verge-of-40 novelist (Mark Polish) who returns to his hometown only to find himself stuck in a really bad, cliched '80s movie -- complete with two bonehead best friends, mean teachers, a moronic high school principal and a hardcore crush on that girl whose meat-head boyfriend is named Brad. And I don't mean cliched '80s movie in a bad way -- that's kinda the point with Stay Cool; our lovable, somewhat-awkward novelist learns that he must overcome the fears and regrets he's had since graduating 20 years ago by living his worst moments all over again.

Some have said Stay Cool is like 17 Again in reverse, which it sorta is -- except there's no magical, supernatural element here. Our guy just somehow finds himself re-living those weird, painful high school moments (as an adult) until he finally comes to grips with his past and his present, and, of course, manages to stay cool.

For women of a certain age, Pretty in Pink is the film for any gal who ever felt a little left of center from the beautiful people. After this flick came out, Molly Ringwald was our patron saint, and Pink was our religion. But, as the story goes, after disastrous test screenings, John Hughes (and Ringwald) decided to scrap the first ending (with Andie and her best friend Duckie, played by Jon Cryer, falling in love and dancing to David Bowie's Heroes) and replace it with Andie (Ringwald) and the bland pretty boy Blane (Andrew McCarthy) reuniting at the prom (in front of his shiny BMW no less) -- and to this day it still ticks me off. To me that ending wasn't about overcoming labels about being rich or poor, it was about the popular and the truly cool, and to watch Andie wander off to the dark side with boring old Blane was not the emotional moment Hughes was probably hoping for (which is also why I liked Some Kind of Wonderful so much; at least Girl-Duckie wins in the end of that flick).

Maybe it was because I had a crush on Duckie, or maybe it's just because I don't like easy endings, but to this day, whenever I watch this movie, I turn it off right before the ending so I don't have to be disappointed all over again. Unfortunately, footage of the original ending has become the stuff of legend. But, just to show you I'm not alone on this one, take a look at a new edit provided by another Pink fan looking to right some wrongs...

Back in March, Jessica shared a script review for Robert Rodriguez's next film -- not the still-suffering Barbarella, but rather Shorts -- a quirky family adventure movie. Now, finally, we've got the cast in place. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Jon Cryer and James Spader have jumped on board, joining William H. Macy, Leslie Mann, Jimmy Bennett, Kat Dennings, Trevor Gagnon, Leo Howard, Devon Gearhart, Jake Short, Jolie Vanier, and Rodriguez's super-cute offspring, Rebel Rodriguez.

The descriptions of the movie on THR and the script review are a little different, but the basic gist of the film is about a magic rock in a suburb where everyone works for the Black Box company. Kids find this rainbow-colored rock that grants wishes, and go a bit nuts with it before the adults get their hands on it and things get even crazier. Bennett plays the protagonist, Toe Jackson, Cryer and Mann play his parents, and Dennings plays his older sister. Spader, meanwhile, plays Mr. Black, and Macy plays "the father of a germphobic genius," which I imagine makes him Dr. Noseworthy. If Robert pulls this off with the same spark that Spy Kids held, this could be one fun flick.

Per usual, Rodriguez is involved in many aspects of the film -- he wrote it, is producing with ex Elizabeth Avellan, and will be director of photography, editor, and visual effects supervisor. According to Variety, production is just gearing up in Austin.

James Denton and Jon Cryer -- two guys who have found enormous recent success on the small screen -- are heading to the bigs for the psychological thriller Tortured. The film starts production on Monday, Erik brought you a bit of news on it last week. Denton is best known for his nuanced portrayal of hunky plumber Mike Delfino on Desperate Housewives, a role that I'm sure has led to countless saucy jokes involving the words "pipe," "tool," and "plumbing." Cryer plays Charlie Sheen's brother on the smash comedy Two and a Half Men, but to an entire generation, he will forever be known as "Duckie" from Pretty in Pink. The guy could cure cancer and I'd still think of him lip-syncing to Otis Redding to impress Molly Ringwald.

Tortured stars Morpheus himself Laurence Fishburne and Cole Hauser. (I have this theory that Hauser and Josh Lucas are the same person, but that's a discussion for another time). Tortured is about "an FBI agent (Hauser) who goes undercover as an organized crime enforcer. When he's ordered to undertake the weeklong torture of an accountant (Fishburne), he begins to question his roles." For his first feature film since 2001's Glam (missed that one), Cryer will go against type to play Hauser's (wisecracking?) partner. Denton will play their supervisor. Nolan Lebovitz (Dr. Benny -- missed that one, too) wrote the script and will direct. Denton's next film is Undead or Alive: A Zombedy, which co-stars Chris Kattan as "a cowboy with a broken heart." My prediction on that one? $100 million easy.