Down to You Reviews

Poor Julia Stiles and Freddie Prinze Jr.! They're personable, engaging, downright adorable actors, and they have sweetly simmering onscreen chemistry. But they're wasted in a movie so slight that it starts fading from memory as you're exiting the theater lobby. Freshman Imogen (Stiles) and sophomore Al (Prinze) fall in love at college in NYC. Everything goes fabulously between them until it doesn't; they begin to bicker and brood for no better reason than that if they don't, there won't be a story. The last straw comes at a wild party, where Imogen pays too much attention to some Jim Morrison lookalike (Ashton Kutcher of That '70s Show, in the role he was genetically determined to play); the evening ends in an ugly fight. Clearly they're going to get back together, but how — especially after she moves to San Francisco? The trouble isn't that this is a typical boy-meets-girl story; as long as there are boys and girls, stories about how they meet, mess up and make up will have an audience. The trouble is that it's only an outline for a typical boy meets girl story, and somehow first-time feature writer/director Kris Isacsson forgot to flesh out the bones. The leads are smart, pretty, nice and supremely unneurotic; they have sharp clothes, amusingly eccentric friends and fabulously supportive parents. Al's mom and dad (Lucie Arnaz, Henry Winkler), a DJ and a TV chef, never miss an opportunity to tell Al how great he is; Imogen's parents send her to France for the summer to stay with fun-loving relatives. Even Al's friend the porn star (Selma Blair) and Imogen's druggy roommate (Rosario Dawson) seem serenely untroubled by their brushes with life's underbelly. No one expects a light teen romance to be Madame Bovary, but this is Colorforms filmmaking.