Teen flick 'Down' in Stiles, script By Erin Podolsky Daily Arts Writer "Down To You" doesn't want to be hated. It tries hard to capture our hearts with its winsome twosome and its cutesy original secondary subplots. But there is something very rotten in the state of the college romantic comedy, and while one of the characters' Macbeth portrayal attempts to commandeer the plot, it would have been more appropriate had he been playing the Danish prince instead. What "Down To You" does have going for it is this - when not making us cringe, it at least makes us grin. There are certainly elements of actual comedy here, although they are poorly served by the cut-and-paste editing job that leaves entire character motivations and evolutions unexplained, not to mention a nonsensical timeline. Worse, the female characters are given short shrift, although the format of the film would have us believe otherwise. Oddly similar to television's "Once Again" and "Real World" is its confessional, direct-address framing device that pops in and out of the film. College students Al (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Imogen (Julia Stiles) offer embarrassingly chunky narration of events, and as a result the movie at first seems far more interested in being quirky than in being competent. This results in a few faux-inspired sequences, namely Al and Imogen telling each other about their first kisses and actually being witness to the other's memory. While they appear to have equal screen time in these little soliloquies, we don't learn too much about Imogen. With Al, though, we meet his family, including his Emeril knock-off dad (Henry Winkler), and we see the hardship he goes through when he and Imogen have their inevitable "I can't do this anymore!" break-up. And what of it? "Down To You" spends most of its time making us ill with corniness and jealous of the perfect relationship between Al and Imogen. Most of the time it plays more like MTV's other excruciatingly squalid sex romp "reality" show, "Undressed," with the same level of acting. By the time the loving couple's love boat starts a-rockin', you'll want to stand up and cheer them on, or at least chant, "Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Spill her blood!" They're that impossibly cute couple that you hear every night on the other side of your dorm room wall. Nobody deserves that kind of happiness unless there's a real reason for it, or at the very least an original plot twist (beware the "I'm late" incident and the "You don't love me you love your friends" argument and of course the ubiquitous big-blow-up-at-the-friend's-party). The flick has a fair amount of randomly funny shtick, though. Selma Blair checks in as Cyrus, MIT drop-out and erstwhile porn star, while Winkler is pretty hysterical as Chef Ray. He offers his son a job doing a cooking show with him titled "COOKS," a culinary version of "COPS." Expect a real version of this on the Food network any day now - it's actually a good idea. So good, in fact, that writer/director Kris Isacsson might have a brighter future conceiving of shows like "Iron Chef" than of films like "Down To You." But there's also a lot of randomly serious shtick, and its presence prevents "Down To You" from being a silly romantic comedy or even a silly romantic parody. Its reliance on aww-inducing foibles (Al and Imogen consume nasty day-old party-store cake every time they have sex - and it's pretty much a no-brainer how Imogen acquires the infamous freshman fifteen) get in the way of something that seems to want to be a love story. Prinze does his best to keep the ship afloat with his blinding smile and puppy-dog eyes, but unfortunately Stiles is unable to keep up her "10 Things I Hate About You" streak. I'll give Stiles the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she just has a really bad memory and that's why she sounds like she's reading her lines off of cue cards, or perhaps an unused "Dawson's Creek" script. (Then again, the movie is akin to watching an entire season of "Dawson's Creek" in fast-forward, only it's a lot less entertaining and, dare I say, rewarding.) Each pearl that issues forth from her lips sounds like it's been thought out - it's the kind of dialogue that looks sharp on paper but aloud sounds a little too deep and planned to be real. Prinze's earnestness and Stiles' woodenness (except when she goes into an excellent almost-strip tease in public to the sounds of Al Green) grapple for control and neither come up the winner. At the end we're left with an afterschool special "love conquers all" ending. It's exactly what is expected. And in a movie this terrible from start to finish, it's exactly what is needed to prevent the conformity police from arresting all those involved - or at least throw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern off the scent. Courtesy of Miramax Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Julia Stiles think 'Mmm...Cakes' in the latest teen cringer "Down To You." Originally on page 5A in the 1-24-2000 issue of the Daily.