Meg Butler Top 3 Reasons to Watch the Documentary A Complete History of My Sexual Failures. 1. The Plot. So Chris Waitt is an attractive, intelligent Englishman who can't figure out why his girlfriend's keep dumping him. So he decides to take a video camera and delve into his past relationships to find out why. What ensues is a hilariously tragic, painful, embarrassing affirmation of the fact that most of us never ask our friends, family and exes "what's wrong with me" because we really don't want to know the answer. This guy had the cojones to ask the question and he spends the rest of the movie getting kicked in them as all his delusions of grandeur are picked apart by various exes and one blind date.2. The embarrassment. Oh, it's unending: the self-deprication, the shame...oh the shame. Embarrassment is now my new favorite genre of movie. It's funny because it's not happening to you, and extra funny because it could be. Boy memory is cruel. Self esteem and forgetfulness gloss a lot of things over. But some people really, really hate you. You get the feeling that if brains did a better job of remembering those hundreds of painful, embarrassing moments then Chris would not have put forth so much effort to unearth them. And I would have missed out on an opportunity to laugh until I cried.3. The realities. He hears what every one of his ex-girlfriends has to say about him and it isn't good. He finds out what a blind date has to say about him. It isn't good. He gets a medical evaluation of himself. It really, really isn't good. And all of it is hilariously terrible and comically timed. Please, please watch this movie.My favorite quotes: "Chris: I was just trying to be myself. Mary: Next time be somebody else."; "I seem to have put her off an entire race of men. Maybe this is a bigger problem than I thought."

Neil Welch While I have some admiration for the concept underlying this movie - a filmmaker retracing his steps to try to establish why he has been such a sexual failure, filmed as a documentary - and, while I found some of it quite funny, it suffered fatally from three things: 1. It was a one-note joke, which became stale quite quickly; 2. The fact that much of it seemed genuine, but some (at least) of it was quite clearly set-up meant that you couldn't fully accept it as either genuine or fictitious, as a result of which it failed to be valid as either; 3. The protagonist became, quite frankly, a complete pain in the *rse after a fairly short while.Sorry, but no thanks.

transient-2 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.

Mikko Riihimaeki 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.