Toute l'histoire de mes échecs sexuels

You know those night when you talk with someone really really well and you're totally astound how deep that person is and how much you're able to find our about yourself? There are movies like it: Breakfast Club comes to my mind right away. Unfortunately "A Complete History..." is not like that. In the beginning I thought it might be, but then it turned out to have bored me to the point where I asked myself how much of this is fake and how much is documentary. It wasn't opening my mind nor had I the feeling it did with the main character. I still give 5 of 10 because it had some interesting/funny/strange parts which I enjoyed. (I saw it at the New Zealand Film Festivals.)

Because thats what i'm having over here. This is a beautiful movie about a self-centric, chaotic, neurotic and hardly sympathetic man in his thirties on a self-reflection-Odyssey. The interviews with his ex-girlfriends paint a grim picture of his personality and yet throughout the entire movie he never seems to care about what they try to tell him. This way it's rather obvious where his relationships fail. And i'm not spoiling anything here, you'll get this in the first ten minutes of the flick.

What i was expecting to see was some kind of insight on his side, but he seems to stay pretty unshaken by the critics. For a glimpse he seemed to get it when he confronts his big love, but it pales in comparison to the incriminating accusations voiced until that point. Therefore the ending drops in rather suspiciously reconciling.

There is some fun to be had with this movie, the cut and the music make it rather watchable. If you can live with penis-jokes and don't mind the ending, give it a shot. It made me feel a little bit better about my unsuccessful relationships, which is at least something.

Like everyone else who sees this flick I was instantly drawn to the title. Sexual failures you say? Then count me in! Failing in a sexual venture is without a doubt the non-physical shot to the crotch. You may or may not see it coming, but when it hits it hurts bad. So, obviously this flick should be a huge success. Really how could a film about someone's sexual failures be...a failure? Well, you'd be surprised.

Chris's History of Sexual Failure was an alright flick, but no way the spectacle you're hoping to see. We follow Chris as he calls and interviews past girlfriends. We see him deal with erectile dysfunction. We see him cry, talk with his Mama, get drunk, and hell, we even see his John Thomas. But more importantly we get to know Chris, but I can't say for sure, it's the 'real' Chris Waitt, we're seeing. The movie overall has a very sneaky mockumentary feel to it, that I don't think many people are picking up on.

For a flick like this to flourish, you need a lot of entertaining things going on, and you also need to relate to and like (or really dislike) the person that everything is centered around. And with Chris, we get a monotone, narcissistic personality that seems to make a total of five facial expressions. He really reminded me of a that 'artsy' kid in high school who came off like he tried too hard. And that also makes me think that a lot of the 'real' moments with Chris solo was just him acting. He always felt like he was trying to keep a straight face. The more I think about it, the more I remember how staged some things felt. But whatever with that, Chris, just simply wasn't the right person for this movie. Carrot Top would've been a much better fit.

Besides my drawbacks with Chris, the film did deliver a moderately entertaining 90 minutes. Chris is a solid film-maker, and it's obvious he tried hard to deliver something appealing. Sh!t, he was whipped butt-nekkid by a dominatrix. Very funny scene by the way. So overall this quirky albeit not totally likable film is falling into a love/hate relationship it seems, but it's no way as near as bad as some people are making it out to be.

I'll say first that I empathize with this narrator and I found this film to be well worth the time. However, having seen far more personal and daring attempts at catharsis I was put off by the film's consistent, crass disingenuity. Within the first ten minutes, it becomes clear that the narrator's quest to pursue the "history of his failed relationships" is merely a narcissistic attempt to further reinforce the high opinion he holds for himself. This is a fantasy rock-star gratifying himself with a wink to the camera, evidenced more by the passive-aggressive and flippant attitude he displays toward the people who've touched him than by the headphones he costumes around his neck. At the beginning of the film we are introduced to a list of his ex-girlfriends, which we should note is average or above average in length for a man his age, a man who is not physically unattractive. He crassly reintroduces himself to each of the lovely women who've left him with obvious disregard for the people they've become, and we retain the impression that he's carried his camera crew with either bitterness or adolescent bravado to their door for a boast. We see him coaxing smiles from attractive young women on the roadside who giggle and coo for his attentions; we see his mother chide him for having ignored the amorous letters of the many women who've adored him, even as he suppresses a smile; we see him make a fool of "geeky" skateboarders, as if his own ostentatious display of guitars didn't evidence some puerile naivete. All this within the first ten minutes - and is all this to establish some wobbly foundation from which he'll fall, and in the throes of personal agony lay himself raw to some revelation? Perhaps, in the last ten minutes. The majority of the film speaks more to pathos than tragedy. The story unfolds as we loathe to expect: he returns to each of his ex-girlfriends to remind them of how he humiliated them the first time, and it will be a pleasure if he can do so again. He even goes through the motions of finding a new girlfriend (since by now we've established firmly that finding a new girlfriend has NEVER been the problem) just so he can vent even more hostility in systematically rejecting and dismissing them all. He just can't seem to find the committed, genuine anger or the beating he wants as a response - not from a counselor, whose words lack the pain and not from a dominatrix, whose pain is misspoken. By the time our hero takes his Viagra and we're equally convinced his problems have nothing to do with sex, just as our 'documentary' seems to devolve into a time-wasting farce, he narrows to his last, most meaningful interview. Hostility is funny but it can't replace an apology. Now the perennial question 'why did you dump me?' is marked by a more tender, anxious delivery. Even as our imagination pads the brevity of this conversation with some depth, one can't help but wonder to what extent, wiping her tears, this woman also felt used. Who couldn't love the way it ends.

Meet Chris Waitt. He's a thirty-something auteur and amateur, who embarks on a project to catalog his past girlfriends following in the footsteps of Jim Jarmusch and "Broken Flowers" featuring the middle-aged Bill Murray. The end result is funnier and different in other aspects, too. Waitt comes off as a Kurt Cobain lookalike, whose toilet floor is carpeted in pubic hair w/ used toilet paper rolls in the corner unlike a furniture catalog by IKEA. He walks around carrying his furry microphone and baggy-saggy pants like a leftover grunge-wars survivor. His "Swedish" face is, however, only the surface, because things are boiling beneath it. As the events that unfold testify, he's got enough balls to visit a dominatrix, test his street-credibility vs. women, serenade a psychotherapist citing "crack-whores" and "religious virgins" and trip on Viagra like we've never seen it happen. The movie suggests that in the lives of most/many GenXers, there are four recurring factors apart from differences in personal hygiene and CV: a) A lost loved one is a mental skeleton in the closet b) (S)he is targeted at least once for reclamation c) Inevitable failure on this front may lead to creation of wicked senses of humor (as a defense mechanism) and d) other people and one's own projects claim the (wo)man in the end. Lived life and history can not be changed. If our relationships are like bridges, we almost always burn them after saying cogently goodbye. Because of these strengths, I was mildly indignant that the audience seemed to revel only in Waitt's failures and shortcomings on the sexual front. I could think of many girls who wouldn't be his match or worthy of him as a date. I rate this film relatively high since it was part of the LOVE & ANARCHY film festival and fulfilled the criteria of providing both aspects of love and anarchy quite satisfactorily. The movie was a bit like Borat for the thinking woman's circle of friends. Hand-held cameras and weird scenes ruled, you know. Out of that L&A context, I can understand if other people find this movie overdone, childish, annoying or crude.