Down to You

Horse shit. Pure, uncut horseshit straight from Bob and Harvey Weinstein's asses and flung at the cineplex screen. "Down to You" is so fucking awful that it doesn't even deserve the same teen audience that watches "Sabrina the Teenage Witch." It's not clever enough for them. I mean, this is embarrassing moviemaking, as though a Backstreet Boys fan snuck into film school and made a movie. The rest of my review is written in hopes that teenagers who type "Freddie Prinze, Jr." into Yahoo stumble across it. My goal is to make them cry, then send me e-mails like "u suck!!!! u only wis you were as hot s fredde prince, jr.!!!!!! go away!!!!! :("

"Down to You" is not so much a "coming of age" story as it is a "dinner coming back up the esophagus" story.

Prinze is going to college in New York. Let's assume it's the same non-existent school that frizzy-haired gutter slut Felicity goes to. He spends his nights doing some heavy underage drinking in a cheap bar. This is where he meets Julia Stiles, a freshman with a face as round as a four-square ball and no tits. They fall in love (apparently off-screen because we don't see it) and have sex and drink a lot. We see no sex, but we are told with cute cues that they are boning more than a sushi chef. They have lots of wacky friends and roommates with no purpose for living except to serve as examples of unamusing wackiness. Then, Stiles goes away to France for a summer. When she comes back she keeps her eyes open during kissing. This is just unacceptable to Prinze, so they start having fights that make no sense and are started for no reason, and then they break up.

Not so fast, we don't get to leave the theater yet. About four or five years pass with nothing happening in anyone's lives except moping, whining and scenes of comic relief that are staged so miserably they feel like root canal. You see, Prinze and Stiles miss each other terribly. By seeing them mope, we are supposed to feel bad as Prinze crushes beer cans, tries to commit suicide (this is played for laughs - hilarious!), and mopes around with his dad Henry Winkler. Meanwhile, Stiles draws shitty romance book covers for a living. Honest to God. Then, Stiles and Prize see each other again trough the magic of movie coincidence. Stiles shows Prinze how she drew him on the cover of a cheap, ugly romance novel titled "Down to You," and they realize they can't live without each other. I busted out laughing during that scene. I don't think I was supposed to, though.

There is not a single element of this movie that's even done competently. I hope you, dear readers, will indulge me as I spend a lot of bandwidth shitting on this movie and the cocksucking whores who forced it on us.

Director Kris Isacsson must be pretty young and very stupid. I assume he is young because if not't he must be a fucking retard to have learned so little in his life. He is inarguably the worst fucking hack director ever to get a theater release. Yes, there are other bad movies, but rarely are they done with the level of technical incompetence shown here. "Down to You" moves from one clunky scene to the next with the grace and ease of a six-year old in eight-inch high-heels walking across gravel.

The scenes are static, blocky and reek of sewage and rotting meat. The actors struggle with the questions of "Why the hell am I here and what the hell am I supposed to be doing?" They move about the scenes like community theater performers, so determined to remember where they are supposed to stand next that they don't bother actually acting. The only reason they move around is so Isacsson can show off more of the clichéd sets he has derived to prove his complete detachment from reality. Not a single scene has a discernible beginning or ending, either. There would have to be tension and suspense for that. Instead, they are just slices of the lives of unlikable whiners and boozers.

Puppets performing the themes of Morrissey songs would be more entertaining and more true.

Because he has no idea how to make the characters interesting, Isacsson uses shorthand to indicate that they are cool. They smoke a lot. They drink to excess. They fuck. They have nice furniture. They listen to 80s music. They have nothing in their heads.

The whole movie has the fluidity and rationale of a series of Sears commercials. Shit just happens and people react in ways that lead to the next scene, but make no sense given what has come before. The action never is dramatic or entertaining, we are never given any reason to give a flying fuck if these two sub-Gap-ad boozers end up together. Well, that's not true, Stiles and Prinze keep coming on screen and talking straight to the camera about why we are supposed to like them. Yes, that's right, Isacsson uses the stale "fourth wall" stunt, apparently oblivious to how that cheesy trick has been beaten worse than Wil Cordero's wife. It's all as fucking cute and revealing as a Nescafe commercial. I bet Isacsson would take that as a compliment.

You just want to take a pair of meat hooks and tear everyone's shins clean out of their legs.

The settings are painfully corny. Isacsson can't even think of one place in New York that we haven't already seen a billion times, and yet he acts like he is the first person to stumble upon Central Park. A lot of it is claustrophobically filmed in bedrooms that are, I'm guessing, in the showroom of an Ikea. They look less like college kids apartments than they do a "college kids apartment" from a telephone commercial targeted at adults. I mean, Isacsson is a dipshit. He has no idea what college looks like, and yet he probably just got through a junior version of one with middling grades

See, that's yet another problem. Isacsson is the director and the writer of this drippy, stinging stream of diarrhea. He reinforces his horrible direction with an even worse script. His ideas are so banal and lame I want to meet him and piss all over his shoes.

Through his cutting insight, the dumbass reveals that love is difficult, kids today have a jaded view of love, and you have to work to stay in love. Well, no fucking shit. I can learn that from "Broom Hilda." Even given the lame themes, Isacsson fucks it all up by having the characters spout them with dialog so bland, so unoriginal, and so stuffed with filler that they just can't be from the head of a person whose brain is getting enough oxygen.

But he believes in himself. And he believes that "wackiness" equals funny, so he tries to balance the heavy load of horseshit with "wacky," strained attempts at humor. There is the pretentious porn star friend of Prinze. Never mind that Isacsson knows nothing about pornogapahy and shows the filming of a "porno" movie with film cameras (not video), outdoors, at night, with a cast of dozens dressed as Revolutionary soldiers. Notr a single person is naked. What the fuck? Never mind that this pretentious fat fuck never has anything to do in the movie. He has no arc, no funny lines, and no reason to exist. He is funny in the same way that drama students are when they act histrionically and wear silly clothes.

There is another character who dresses like Jim Morrison and is named Jim Morrison. I'm sure Isacsson giggled like mad with his friends at the coffee house when he thought up this character, but he's about as funny as a quadriplegic at an orgy.

At one point one character says "I'm not good with open wounds. I was never your king, but you were always my Lancelot." What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Why is Isacsson so impressed with his own third-grade sentimentality? Why the fuck does he think we should pay to see his embarrassing smegma?

The performances of Prinze and Stiles are awkward. They can't dance, yet Isacsson makes a point of showing how funky they are. Together, they have the chemistry of dogshit. Mostly, I think the problem is Isacsson's direction, but it would have helped if the actors had charisma.

Prinze is just flat, pasty and blueish. He mopes, reads his lines, and clearly doesn't give a flying fuck about this movie. I think teen girls think he is cute and I won't argue with them because they're likely to scratch my eyes out. But, they're wrong. There is no charm, nothing clever. He's just a guy who should be selling muffins at Starbucks but somehow won the Hollywood lottery. Isacsson should be the guy sweeping the floor at the Starbucks.

Stiles tries harder, but she's an idiot. She is not going through the motions so much is she is trying very hard to understand why her character would say the shit that spews from her mouth. She's lost, very lost, and she shows it in every scene.

One finger. One lousy fucking finger. I want my God damn money back and I want those fat Weinstein Brothers to stop putting out shit like this. I don't like teenagers, but I sure as hell don't think they should be exploited this badly.