Project X (2012)

Saw Project X (thanks, Emilio.) It was a tedious, depressing film. It follows three teenagers as they plan the most epic rager of a party ever that will turn their lives around and totally get them laid. The way its shot really makes it look like a horror film. It's shot found-footage style with shaky-cams and filmed by a teen who is "weird" (he wears a trench coat.) We see the main character's parents expressing worry about leaving their child alone. The film even opens with the bucolic noises of suburbia, lulling us into a calm which is traditionally soon to be shattered by some terrible event. Of course, the party is the thing which shatters this calm and which therefore is the monster of this horror.

The film was apparently shot on a sound stage where they built a house and invited a bunch of celeb-wanna-bees to party and film it with their cellphones. The resulting footage is pretty much what you would expect: poorly lit, not centered, and boring. They intercut this footage with clips telling the tedious tedious story of the protagonist finally boning a lady. The film is full of cruelty and the sort of mean foulness that seems funny when you're drunk and feeling belligerent. There's a little lap dog, for example, who is shut up in drawers, dyed orange, and tied to balloons. Presumably the film is making some anti-lap-dog statement. Perhaps the filmmakers are more cat people. Doubtful however. this party seemed pretty hostile to all forms of life.

I found the film tedious and deeply depressing. The film is very generous towards the party-goers. It's only near the end of the film, for example, that windows start breaking. The protagonist floats around, freaking out and then relaxing into this wicked-awesome party bro, as his parent's house is systematically destroyed. There's a car, for example, that the protagonist's father asks him to be careful of. This is the car whose submersion into the pool was featured so heavily in the trailers. The central trio keep shouting at each other in shrill teenage squawks that this party is absolutely crazy, but it just looked like a long, awful, dubstep-riddled chore to me. David Mamet argues in many of his works that man is only one bad day away from descending to level of animals. This film argues that we are only one party away, and it's right.