Big Screen Peter: Project X

Project X is raunchy. It's misogynistic, it's bawdy, and all sorts of wrong. But it's also hilarious. The wrong is refreshing.

It, like the recent Chronicle, is another in a growing trend of “found footage” films. While in conception these movies are supposed to promote reality, the actuality is never quite there. Instead, while audiences know the unreality, the technique brings an unaffected immediacy to the story. There's still a fourth wall, but it's a shadow of itself. The borders between the screen and the audience are fluid in ways traditionally structured films aren't.

Director Nima Nourizadeh, in his feature debut, uses this immediacy to great effect.  Project X tells the story of three high school friends intent — to varying degrees — on throwing a great party and thus becoming cool. While certainly a premise that has played out a thousand times over in movies, Project X largely stays above the careworn nature of the narrative concept with an unrelenting pace of truly adolescent humor.

Though certainly in part attributable to the screenwriting team of Michael Bacall and Matt Drake, the cast of friends — played by Thomas Mann, Oliver Cooper, and Jonathan Daniel Brown — deserve  unchecked praise for their work.  The trio had little to no acting experience between them, but brought a joyous reality to the film, giving viewers a realistic insight into the true worldviews of many teenage boys.

Even at its most asinine and pubescent, the humor rings true time and again.

And with countless and gratuitous shots of topless girls and pulsing scenes of unadulterated mania, Project X matches the highs of such recent classics like Superbad or Old School and likewise seems destined to become a comedy touchstone (which, given the involvement of Todd Phillips (The Hangover) as producer, may seem inevitable in hindsight).

The movie is far from perfect, drifting too far into absurdism at times. The ending is a trite bit of candy ass sentimentality, tacked on to give the otherwise unrepentant nihilism of the previous 80 minutes a moral center. While calculated and a bit disconnected from the anarchic and absurdist tone, it's a concession that doesn't destroy the good will built with the previously humorous pitch. If anything, it marks the protagonist (Mann) with a bit more humanity in the face of such uncontrolled revelry.

No awards will be forthcoming for Project X.

And it's certainly not fit for the more mature moviegoers among us. But it is a needed slice of unselfconscious levity and well worth the price of entry for anyone in need of absurdist humor, adolescent or otherwise.