THE ART OF GETTING LET DOWN: PROJECT X REVIEW

     Have you ever been at the movies expecting one thing and getting something completely different?  I don’t mean like you go see Barney and Barbie Take Over Hollywood and it turns into Dog Day Afternoon, that’d be ridiculous and pretty cool. But anyways, today's review is Project X, directed by Nima Nourizadeh and produced by Hangover director Todd Philips.  This is one of those movies that you go expecting one thing and come out with another.

Despite the goblet, this film is nothing like Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

     I went to an advanced screening of Project X and was skeptical.  I’ll get to my grade later on but I’ll say now it wasn’t bad.  It’s being billed as “The Hangover with high schoolers”!  I’ll tell you now folks that’s wrong.  That’s wrong as hell.  It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in common with The Hangover besides being about a night of partying. I’ll also point this out before I get to the heavy stuff:  There’s too many high school titties in this movie to be like The Hangover or to avoid possible federal investigation.  If you’re a 45 year old father of 2, don’t see this movie or you’ll have to register as a sex offender.

     Anyways, for the most part, the movie’s pretty solid.  Thomas Mann and Jonathon Brown (playing Tom and JB respectively) have solid performances.  The main cameraman (the movie’s shot from a handheld perspective of multiple characters but not like a bad Cloverfield/Blair Witch Project copy) Dax is a sweet reference to American Beauty and who doesn’t love allusions to great films?  The only performance that will make it or break it for people is Costa, the archetypal annoying-should-be-charismatic-but-really-isn't party guy as played by Oliver Jonah Hill Jr. Cooper.  Within 5 lines I wanted him publically executed, but that’s the exact character they wanted.  Plus he has a couple good lines, mostly about his penis.

^This guy.  The guy on the left.  His penis.

Okay, maybe not.

     The hilarious, extremely self-referential writing and screenplay are pretty fantastic besides the end which I’ll get to later.  The storyline moves quickly and gets pretty bizarre and I love it when that happens.  You really move and flow with the movie, which is always the best thing about a good script.  Plus this movie has almost everything any high schooler and college kid (meaning boy and some lesbians) wants: midgets, flying dogs, ecstasy, boobs, techno, weed, flamethrowers, anarchists, sex jokes, and of course, more booze than Lindsay Lohan drank since last Thursday.

     These among other things are what I absolutely loved about the movie.  The film works like the inverse of most other films.  Whereas most movies have sweet beginnings, middles you might get lost in, and good endings, this movie has an eh beginning, a beautiful, awesome middle, and an absolute grisly, disgusting trainwreck of an ending. 

     
     SPOILER ALERT!: This is what I didn’t like about this movie and it works on a few levels.  The whole time, this film works as if it were much more than the high school party gone awry film.  Everything gets so chaotic, so out of control, so excessive, that you can’t wait for Thomas Mann to get his ass whipped and punished by EVERYONE.  It was at this point that it hit me… This film is deep.  The film COULD BE a philosophical discourse on the nature of modernAmerican youth, cultural divides, coming of age, ecstasy and anarchy versus order and reason through the lens of Lockean and Hobbesian social contract theories (oh look at me being all college-y).  My heart was pounding, my mind was racing I was hooked, a mad junkie desperate for his next fix.  What I thought would be the final shot of a barren grey sky backdrop with Thomas Mann sitting alone and abandoned on the faint, dilapidated blue bleachers was gonna make me cry tears of sadness for him and at the beauty of it as a strangely beautiful work.  But then, right as I was about to give it a standing ovation for its multilayered successes, some strange specter from the deep dank abyss of pop culture came out of nowhere and delivered me such a blow to the stomach that I couldn’t even breathe.  I sat back in my chair for the next 15 minutes dazed, confused and wraught with despair as I watched this film commit cinematic suicide right in front my very eyes.
  

     The film had basically 5 or 6 endings.  The first one (the one I described) was amazing because it would have been open to interpretation and the good guy looked to have lost.  A Greek Tragedy. "What made him powerful kills him"; beautiful shit.  Real Raging Bull, Citizen Kane type shit.  Then the dad comes and is totally okay with what happened to his goddamn house; then everyone at school loves him and he gets the recognition he wanted; then the girl he screwed up with takes him back; then the news raves about the party; and then the executioner delivered the final crushing blow when Costa comes on and alludes to a possible sequel in a stupid staged tv interview.  The final ending is during the credits, where I cry for several hours about the end of the film.

     This movie should have quit while it was ahead but instead, so that it wouldn’t be a dark and moving morality tale of excess and its physical consequences and philosophical implications plus a sweet party flick, plays into every stereotype of the high school party comedy.  Because this movie had to ruin itself with its pitiful, sell out ending that made me and literally everyone else in the movie theatre who just wanted to see an open ending where the good guy tragically loses, want to set Todd Philips on fire, I award Project X despite all its great qualities a C+.

Orson Welles is not a fan.

C+

     Long winded, but true.  Follow me on Twitter for everything you need to know about movies and like the new Page on Facebook! As always,

~Viva amigos,

      ~D. Merrick

ROLL THE REEL: THE IN BETWEEN TEENS - 1914

To kick things off here folks in Merrick's March Movie Madness, I'm starting out my journey through cinema with the "In Between Teens".  

I call the 1910's the In Between Teens because this era was the questionable adolescence of cinema.  Cinema was unsure about itself like the lead character in a bad John Hughes movie (or all John Hughes movies) and was searching for a voice.  These years were formative for the entire world; imperialism was the diplomacy of choice; Empires were falling and being created everyday; the world was at war for the later half of the decade; the number of political movements growing and dying in America alone were creating turmoil, but also making the era truly exciting.  Taking a nod from the decade they were made in, films were never sure what was going to happen next.  It was in this decade that such celebrated filmmakers as Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chpalin, Yakov Protazanov, and Giovanni Pastrone got their start and cinema became a real contender (ANYBODY CATCH THE REFERENCE??) as an art form even without CGI, color, sound, or Botox.

My first favorite year in this crazy decade is 1914, the year War broke out in Europe and plenty of people in the U.S. were hesitant about getting involved.  1914 marked three watershed events in cinema that also happen to be three of my favorite movies.  ROLL THE REEL, JOHNNY.

1914

I.   KID AUTO RACES AT VENICE (Released Feb. 7th, 1914)

Directed by Henry Lehrman

     Ah, Chaplain you strange little man with a controversial mustache.  This film marked Chaplain's first appearance as his now iconic "Little Tramp" character that has been copied, covered, spoofed, mentioned, stolen, and emulated by everybody from Robert Downey, Jr. (in a film about Chaplain so I guess it makes sense) to Stanley Kubrick.

     Kid Auto Races at Venice is literally just 6 minutes of Chaplain getting booted off camera for getting in the way of almost every shot the director is trying to get of cars zooming past at a Venice Beach drag race.  What makes this film golden is the fact that it was actually improvised and he really was annoying the crowd (not the director who was in on the whole thing).  The facial and physical comedy, fluid editing, and camera movement were unheard of for comedy and are still too complex for most silly, brutally stupid, slapstick comedies of today (The Tooth Fairy anyone?).

     This film (along with Chaplain's debut Making a Living which came out literally 5 days before) established Chaplain as a superstar in the United States and every director, actor, bowler hat enthusiast, and movie lover can thank him and the silly cops and executives at Keyston Studios for that.

II.   GERTIE THE DINOSAUR (Released September 14th, 1914)

Directed by Winsor McCay

     Like all good children of the '90's, I'm an animation junkie.  If I could move into Rocko's Modern Life or into Dexter's Laboratory, I'd be typing this from the sketchbook of Joe Murray/Genndy Tartakovsky in a heart beat.  I've got an IV full of Spongebob and it's never leaving my mainline.  But enough of this Clinton-era nostalgia!  Were it not for this film, I'd be talking about going outside or some nonsense like that.

     Gertie the Dinosaur although is not the first animated feature film, is one of the most influential pieces of animation to ever spill out of the mind of someone with a name as nerdy as Winsor McCay.  The film is simply the chronicles of a dinosaur named Gertie and how she goes about her day in a prehistoric, animated world.  She's a very mischievous dinosaur and often gets scolded by the big bad director, who ultimately ends up jumping into her world to ride on her head into the sunset.

     Everyone from Walt Disney to Terry Gilliam to Trey Parker & Matt Stone have noted this film as an influence on their animation style for its playful nature with subtly subversive humor.  This groundbreaking piece of animated cinema was one of the first films to be recognized as a "masterpiece", and if you watch it, o fair reader, you'll see exactly why.

III.     CABIRIA (Released April 18th, 1914)

Directed by Giovanni Pastrone

     When it was re-screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Martin Scorsese filmed an introduction about its beauty and importance to Italian cinema and all cinema.  This five part film odyssey is to Italy what Birth of a Nation is to America: the first film epic (...and a tool used by hate groups to get people to join their savage ranks but that's besides the point don't worry about it).  It forged new grounds for cinema in terms of scale, cinematography, and story that had yet to be tried and that most filmmakers are still fearful of today.

     Cabiria tells various stories from the history of the Roman Empire all woven into the life and love of one girl named Cabiria.  I do not want to spoil the plot of the film, nor do I want to spend the next 8 days typing, so I can only say WATCH IT. Although it's denser than Proust and longer than a 2 day acid flashback, it's one of the most amazing feats of film that you'll ever feast your eyes on.

     This movie is, like the others that I listed above, one of my absolute favorites and one of the major jumping points for film.  It came at a time when cinema was looking for a voice, and it gave movies a voice as epic and cool as James Earl Jones singing Rolling Stones songs in the shower.  This one raised the bar and remains an amazing, awe-inspiring sight today, which is not something that can be easily accomplished.  If I were to make a comparison, we watch this movie today the same way my 128 great great great grandkids (whose great great grandparents I didn't know existed or "paid child support" for) will look at The Lord of the Rings series; NOT Avatar or Titanic because everyone in the future will have run James Cameron back into the woods far away from movies where he belongs.

This marks the beginning, folks.

Stay tuned as Merrick's March Movie Madness continues with my next favorite year in cinema:

1915!

Follow me on Twitter ( @DylanMerrick6 ) for all the best movie info and news (plus some other stuff too from time to time).  And always remember!

~Viva amigos,

   ~D. Merrick