Quadruple Bill Mini Musings: Parties, Submarines, Dreams, and Venice...

Project X:
What's it about?
Three increasingly vulgar and cliched American teens look to become high school legends by throwing an epic house party in this documentary style comedy.
Who would I recognise in it?
Nobody, but you'll be familiar enough with the endless cliches, and it's produced by Todd "The Hangover" Phillips as well as co-written by Michael "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World" Bacall.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Being a first person movie (think Cloverfield), it naturally suffers from all the problems and impossibilities that are ever-present in this annoyingly over-used presentation style. Please stop making 'found footage' movies! Beyond that, the central trio (with a fourth behind the camera) are all grating suburban white boys who fancy themselves as 'players', when in reality they're total losers, and their way of upping their school yard cache crosses all kinds of lines of moral comfort. We have the 'average' lead who is overly influenced by his exceptionally vulgar (and in this instance quite nasty) right-hand-man, while being accompanied by the token fat kid, and a creepy goth on camera duties. The set-up of the main trio strains to imitate the vulgar-but-harmless (not-to mention fairly realistic) teens of Superbad, but Project X fails miserably in establishing characters to root for - not least because their hijinks ultimately destroys the home of the protagonist's parents - their entire lives ruined, all for one stupid night to increase their cred in the dying days of school. Indeed, the resulting lack of real consequence proves quite disturbing - the lead has destroyed the home that his innocent parents have worked hard for, and in-the-process, lost his college tuition money (so there goes his prospects for a better future). Meanwhile, the real instigator gets off on all charges thanks to an expensive lawyer - and never mind that their trail of destruction nearly burned down a neighbourhood populated by innocent people.

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Who Saw Her Die? (Aldo Lado, 1972) DVD Review

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Opening in the snowy hills of France in 1968, it's not long before Ennio Morricone's eerily memorable score seeps into the film (children singing the title like a nursery rhyme), as we are plunged behind the veil of a killer – a twisted psychopath whose modus operandi relates to red-haired girls – in one of a series of effectively orchestrated scenes of stalking. At these times, and indeed throughout the film, Aldo (Night Train Murders) Lado's tight direction, Franco (Amityville 2) Di Giacomo's gorgeous cinematography, Morricone's score, and Angelo Curi's skilled editing, combine to create a sinister journey through the echoing waterways, canals, stairways, rooftops, and breath-taking architecture of Venice.

Pre-dating the much more widely recognised Don't Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973), which tread similar ground a year later, Who Saw Her Die? details the trauma suffered by sculptor Franco (a rail-thin George Lazenby) and his estranged wife Elizabeth, after their red-haired daughter Roberta is taken by the veiled woman in black and found dead in the waters of a fruit market. However, Massimo D'Avack and Francesco Barilli's script (with help from Aldo Lado and Ruediger Von Spihes) opts to pay more attention – in true giallo fashion – to a civilian's (Franco) quest to find the killer when an ineffective police force can't help (you'll find similar narrative approaches in the likes of Dario Argento's The Bird With The Crystal Plumage).

 

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