Down to You
Year 2000 Trademarks:
- Gratuitous Ally McBeal-inspired Motown lip-syncing
- Contrasted by NY Times with short-lived WB dramedy Popular
- Second-act scene revolving around a CD wallet
What’s it like 10 years later?
Down to You was the first 2000 film I re-watched this year that I wanted – I mean really wanted – to like. Not that I am (or was) an especially huge Freddie Prinze, Jr. fan. And as a straight male without nothing remotely resembling a girlfriend, I’m not really the target market for a romantic comedy that has lines from Julia Styles like, “That kiss belongs in a box so I can show it to my grandkids some day!”
But I wanted to like Down to You because teen films, for better or worse, encapsulate the era in which they were made better than any other genre. Like the insecure 16-year-olds that watch them, teen films desperately want to be cool, and this desire for coolness trumps any desire to be timeless (they’re like Aerosmith in that way). Unlike, say, Terms of Endearment, teen films could give two shits how their soundtracks, outfits, hairstyles and language would look next month, let alone decades on. This is the reason Oingo Boingo can be heard on the soundtracks to Weird Science, Back to School and Teen Wolf Too, yet you don’t hear an octogenarian Henry Fonda listening to ’80s New Wave in On Golden Pond. Just as my older brother once dropped $120 on a Raiders Starter jacket he wouldn’t be caught dead in by sophomore year, teen films are only concerned with the present.
In other words, I was expecting Down to You to be bad, but bad in a way that was fun. The movie, I had hoped, would serve as a kind of cultural time-capsule filled with period awfulness. Sadly, the movie’s suckiness was of a more eternal and generic type. With the exception of a Goo Goo Dolls song and an awkward shot of the World Trade Center, the movie could have been written a week ago. It was the first 2000 movie I wanted to like, and wound up being the first I could find virtually nothing redeeming in.
Like the more winning 500 Days of Summer, Down to You wanted to be Gen-Y’s Annie Hall (but with a less-depressing ending), following from meet-cute to breakup (and back in this case) the relationship between uptight college student Freddie Prinze Jr. and Julia Styles, a free-spirited artist so wild she actually dances in front of an NYU common room while yelling, “Sometimes you just gotta loosen up!” (direct quote). Also like Annie Hall and 500 Days, the film dabbles in meta-moments, including childhood flashbacks and split screens, plus a “dual narration” by the two leads, which is a device even more annoying than it sounds.
Though aggravating, these meta-moments actually lead to one of the few anthropologically fascinating parts of the movie: a dream sequence in which Prinze Jr. appears on Comedy Central’s The Man Show (which went off the air six years ago). I like to imagine historians watching the movie in 300 years and assuming this “Man Show” was made up by the brilliant writers of Down to You as some kind of abstract metaphor for masculinity (which, I suppose, The Man Show kind of is).
Henry Winkler, playing Prinze Jr.’s celebrity chef father (and easily the best part of the movie) provides another scene that’s, in a weird way, kind of prophetic to watch 10 years on, in which he pitches his son a high-octane Cops-like culinary show called “Cooks!” that eerily predicts the bizarre realms reality TV would soon venture into five months before Survivor premiered.
Most fascinating, though, a decade has also proven Down to You to be another example of the “Real Genius Theory” of teen movie’s fickle stardom, which states that a given actor in a teen comedy playing the crazy friend (X), given a few years’ time (T), will prove infinitely more successful than the film’s actual star (Y). The lead of Real Genius was technically Gabriel Jarret, but it was his wild and unpredictable roommate Val Kilmer who would go on to fly jets with Tom Cruise.
Similarly, the stars of Down to You are technically Julia Styles are and Freddie Prinze Jr., but 10 years later their crazy friends Rosaio Dawson and Ashton Kutcher are the ones starring in Sin City and fucking Demi Moore while Prinze Jr. fans wonder if the six aired episodes ABC’s Freddie will be released on DVD. Thus proving, once again, (XT) > Y, just like Wiley Wiggins vs. Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, Ethan Embry vs. Seth Green in Can’t Hardly Wait, and Jeremy London vs. Jason Lee in Mallrats did.
A rare exception to this rule is Risky Business. And to be honest I’ve always considered Curtis Hanson and Bronson Pinchot to be more famous than Tom Cruise.
