I The Michigan Theater plays host to the benefit Mock Rock. Featuring many athletes lipsyncing to various songs, the show is a benefit concert for the Jeff Reese Scholarship Fund. 7 p.m. fbe iftcflogan &tiu Breaking Records spins with reviews of the "Scream 3 Soundtrack" and new albums by D'Angelo and Enigma. Monday January 24, 2000 Teen flick 'Down' in Stiles, script By En Podosyt 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 play- ing 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 ele- ments of actual comedy here, although they are poorly served by the cut-and-paste editing job Down To that leaves entire character YOU. motivations and evolutions * unexplained, not to mention a nonsensical timeline. Worse, At Briarwood, Quality 16 the female characters are given & Stowcase short shrift, although the format of the film would have us g.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 solilo- quies, 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 hard- ship 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 excruciating- 'Beauty,' Cruise tame Globes By En Podolsky Daily Arts Writer The 2000 awards season is officially off and running with the presentation of the 57th annual Golden Globe Awards last night in Los Angeles. Lacking the host and shtick, length and (some would say) street cred of the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes must be content with the knowledge that they have been and forever will be little more than a precur- sor to the big show otherwise known as the Oscars. The first award of the night was pre- sented by Ben Affleck and Charlize Theron, who with little fanfare announced the nominees for the best supporting actress award. Angelina Jolie walked away with the statuette for her performance as a sociopathic wild child in "Girl, Interrupted." Her acceptance was a little more exciting in that she brought her brother up on stage with her to "show him the view." Affleck, suffering from terminally bad hair, and Theron, suffering from what looked like a nasty case of terminal boredom, then announced the winner of the best supporting actor award. Tom Cruise, nominated for his work as sex seminar guru Frank TJ Mackey in "Magnolia," won his second Golden Globe in a row after his win for "Jerry Maguire" in 1996. Claiming to be jet- lagged but by far the most composed winner of the night, he devoted most of his acceptance speech to Paul Thomas Anderson, telling the story of how the impresario writer/director wrote the role just for him after meeting him on the set of Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut." The Globes' patchwork of TV and film awards began with the shift from the movie world to the idiot box as the award for best lead actress in a comedy was presented. HBO's growing stable of critically acclaimed - and publicly acclaimed - shows racked up its first win of what turned out to be a very suc- cessful night in Sarah Jessica Parker's lead role on "Sex and the City." "I'm not a winner" Parker announced in confusion, sounding like someone who had snacked on a few too many helium-filled balloons. Brandishing her award, she exclaimed, "I don't know what people do with these things, this is amazing" Parker also had the dubious distinction of being the first of at least three winners who mistakenly read the teleprompter's request to "please wrap up" their speeches. "The Sopranos" stars Edie Falco, Lorraine Bracco and James Gandolfini, two of whom went on to win awards See Globes, Page SA Courtesy o Miramax Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Julia Stiles think 'Mmm...Cakes' in the latest teen cringer "Down To You." ly squalid sex romp "reality" show, "Undressed," with the same level of acting. By the time the loving cou- ple'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 pret- ty 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 tht 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 par- ody. 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 ofAl 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 expect- ed. 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. Golden Globe Winners Best Drama: 'American Beauty' Best Comedy: 'Toy Story 2' Best Actress (Drama): Hilary Swank, 'Boys Don't Cry' Best Actor (Drama): Denzel Washington, 'The Hurricane' Best Actress (Comedy): Janet McTeer, 'Tumbleweeds' Best Actor (Comedy): Jim Carrey, 'Man on the Moon' Best Supporting Actress: Angelina Jolie, 'Girl, interrupted' Best Supporting Actor: Tom Cruise, 'Magnolia' Best Director: Sam Mendes, 'American Beauty' Best Screenplay: Alan Ball, 'American Beauty' Best Original Score: 'The Legend of 1900' Best Original Song: "You'll Be in my Heart," 'Tarzan' Best Foreign Language Film: 'All About my Mother' Best TV Drama: 'The Sopranos' Best TV Comedy: 'Sex and the City' Best Actress (TV Drama): Edie Falco, 'The Sopranos' Best Actor (TV Drama): James Gandolfini, 'The Sopranos' Best Actress (TV Comedy): Sarah Jessica Parker Best Actor (TV Comedy): Michael J. Fox Best TV movie: 'R KO 281' Best Actress in a TV movie: Halle Berry Best Actor in a TV movie: Jack Lemmon Best Actress in a Supporting TV role: Nancy Marchand Best Actor in a Supporting TV role: Peter Fonda _Actress Blair gets 'Down"n edgy By Christopher Cousino Daily Arts Editor } Who can say they've shared a liplock with handsome hotty Ryan Phillipe, the goofy, cute Freddie Prinze, Jr. and the heart- stopping Jared Leto? None other than 1995 University gradu- ate Selma Blair. And she's not complaining. "That seems to be all I.do these days and God bless it. It's not a bad way to make a living,'jokes Blair. Her most recent peck on the lips comes with Prinze, Jr. in the latest teen flick "Down To You," which opened Friday. It's a story of first love between Al (Prinze, Jr.) and Imogen (Julia Stiles) set during the college years in New York City. Blair doesn't consider this a teen movie. "This one's growing up a little. This one's college. It's just a very sweet honest story about first love and going 1back to first love if it falls apart" In "Down To You," Blair plays Cyrus, "kinda the other woman," she described. "Actually what's boiled down to a pret- ty small part because, as usual, I didn't facilitate anyone else's storyline. If Freddie fell for me, you wouldn't like him so much. You really want to like Freddie and Julia, so I'm the bad seed that wound up a little bit on the cutting room floor, which is a OK because I had a great time working on it anyhow." Blair credits much of the fun to Prinze, Jr., whom she con- siders "such a dear friend." "Right away, we hit it off. We were always goofy with each other. And I read in some magazine that he wrote, 'Selma's me with breasts.' I guess he's never seen me naked because that's not my body type:' laughed Blair. "He left this message on my machine before we started shooting and said, 'Hi Selma. I don't know if you know me, my name is Freddie Prinze, Jr. and I'm going to be doing your next movie,' and I was like, 'My NEXT movie?,' I have a bit part in his next movie. So I walked into that knowing it was going to be a real- ly great set." After wrapping "Down To You," Blair jumped sets onto a yet-to-be-released film called "A Leonard Cohen Afterworld," featuring a "fairy tale love story" with Leto. "It's so clearly a not a teen movie," warned Blair, "because it's very edgy. It's a guy road trip movie. It's got drugs and it's got sex. I play a girl from Michigan who goes out to L.A. to find stardom and it fails." Moving out of the teen genre Blair said, "I was actually playing a 25-year-old, so it was great to break out of the whole David Cassidy type." D4n't Pa nic!! If you think you're pregnant... call us-we lsten, we care. PROBLEM PREGNANCY HELP 975-4357 Any time, any day, 24 hours. Fully confidential. Serving Students since 1970. Courtesy of Miramax Selma Blair stars in "Down To You." I * READ DAILY ARTS ONLINE AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM. a Frustrated and disappointed with the University? Need help making sense of your U of M experience? Check out http://universitysecrets.com woomm" Then consider a career in Information Technology recruiting! Recruiting is one of the hottest, and virtually unknown, career fields! Why IT Recruiting? " Recruiters can earn between $40,000 to $500,000 per year, with most averaging over $100,000 annually. " Recruiting is the best "sales" job you can get. 90% of your first contact with potential clients is greeted with "YES!" " Working Woman magazine rated it the number one "Top-Dollar Job" with earnings reaching $300,000-$500,000. Why the Recruiter Academy? " Unbelievably fun, flexible work environment with other X- Gen professionals in southeast Michigan. 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