The "Project X" reviews are in -- and they're terrible! "It's pure bong water," sneered Tom Long from the Detroit News. "There is no way you could make this movie stupider or more pointlessly noisy than it already is," groaned the New York Post's Sara Stewart. "It aims for the bottom, and hits the bulls-eye," sighed Andrew Lapin from NPR. In short, the critical consensus on "Project X" is not great, but that didn't stop one high-profile publication from giving the Todd Phillips production a rave review: the New York Times.
Before you wonder what venerable Times film critics A.O. Scott and Manhola Dargis were smoking, note that the "Project X" review was written by Neil Genzlinger, described in his bio on the Times' website as "the all-purpose scavenger" of reviewing.
Wrote Genzlinger about the party comedy:
while Moviefone's Mike Ryan gave it "three-and-a-half stars" while Variety liked it too.
The Oscars are swell, but once in a while a film comes along that is so courageous it deserves consideration for the Nobel Prize. An entire generation has been born and gone to college since the Beastie Boys defined that most basic of civil liberties: You've got to fight for your right to party. The makers of “Project X,” knowing how short the teenage memory is, have now boldly, raunchily made the declaration again, preventing millions of young people from growing up without understanding that every 17-year-old is entitled to a drunken, deafening, topless, drug-filled, sex-crazed, property-destroying, life-endangering birthday.Sarcasm? Probably not? At least not when you take Genzlinger's final line about the film into account:
The “Animal House” of the iPhone generation? Could be. Pretty enjoyable for parents too."Project X" also received a favorable review from Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman,