Project X: One of the Worst Movie-Going Experience of My Life

We rushed to see Project X after the Oscars, this movie has to be the weirdest awards chaser ever. I did a bit of free writing after saw the movie, you know, just typing whatever popped into my head. Now I've gone back to whisk my incoherence into what could pass as a review, so here goes:

The Youth of Today

Project X is one of the worst movie going experiences of my life. A movie so ugly, so repulsive, it represents everything that's wrong with the ME generation and makes me ashamed to be young.

The "story" is ripped from the headlines. It bears a resemblance to a Sydney teenager, Corey, 16, who issued an open invitation via MySpace to a party while his parents were on holiday. What followed could only be described as a "rampage" and a "parent's worse nightmare' as 500 youths destroyed neighborhood property and threw bottles at police trying to control the chaos.

This behaviour is the inspiration for Project X, the latest from producer Todd Phillips, who is responsible for The Hangover. His fascination with men behaving badly continues only now he has found a new Rat Pack in the form Thomas Mann (Thomas), Jonathan Daniel Brown (JB) and the insufferable Oliver Cooper (Costa), who are more repulsive than the adults who conquered the box office before they will have the opportunity tomorrow. The film opens March 1st.

The brings to life the craziest high school party of all time, but then laughs off all the consequences even when a lunatic shows up with a flamethrower to torch the neighbourhood, and then has the gaul to present high school popularity as a fitting reward for abhorrent behaviour.

It brings the party to life using the worn out "found footage" technique. When the same technique was used in The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, it proved that the limitation of a micro-budget breeds creativity. Now, the technique is formula. The Devil Inside, and now, this Project X piece of shit, are exercises in how to keep costs to ridiculous lows and yield inexplicable profits without keeping to the level of artistry set by its superior predecessors.

When I thought the movie was going to condemn the behaviour, a high school sweetheart (Kirby) tells birthday boy (Thomas) that "its not cool" but it turns out that she only disapproves because he only nearly slept with an another girl instead of her, then they kiss and make up!

Not to mention the movie is offensive to women, gay, jewish and fat people everywhere. It often resorts to fat jokes and the word "faggot" for humour. If anybody dares to question the behaviour or thinks twice about it, they are totally emasculated, sometimes violently so, and labelled "pussies".
 

Miles Teller ain't above no drug scramblin'

The characters here are so repulsive they make The Inbetweeners look like nuns. In one scene, the wonderful actor Miles Teller, (Rabbit Hole) takes a baseball bat to a garden gnome filled with ecstasy pills. It explodes, scattering pills all over the backyard. All the teenagers scramble and happily pick pills out of the dirt like disgusting pigs that have never been fed.

What's worse is that in our screening everybody clapped and cheered at what they had just seen. I've never come so close to booing at a screening. The last 15 minutes of the movie was spent thinking of how I could ruin everybody's fun knowing they would all love it come the end, you know, just to remind everyone that to simply enjoy this movie is reprehensible.
 
It's made by people that want teenagers to rush to the cinema thinking this was "the party they've only dreamed about" when in fact it's the party of nightmares.

What's so repellent about the movie is that the target audience will love it. It will probably do gangbusters at the box office. It left me wondering if the whole thing was some kind of sick joke. 

Adding to my already roused suspicions, was the presence of YouTube personality daxflame, who is famous on YouTube because nobody, still to this day, is sure if his online persona as a socially awkward teenager is real or fake. He appears in the movie only briefly, but is referred to by his username "dax", and is later suspected of murdering his own parents.

If the presence of daxflame and echoing a real-life event (when youth combined with alcohol and a hyper networked culture also resulted in chaos) is evidence of the filmmakers winking at the audience, or an attempt to justify the film with irony, then it failed at that too.

Wink enough and you might have one thinking person convinced that the film is some kind of youth satire. Stupid Todd Phillips may believe he is smuggling in criticism of our youth culture while simultaneously giving his target audience exactly what it wants, but I call bullshit.

This is adolescent wish fulfillment made by aging producers who want to relive their youth, only some adolescents should never have their wishes fulfilled.
 
I hated it, I hated it so much.