A Brilliant Conflict

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

The negative reviews about this film are plainly missing the point. This film is extremely well made tragi-comedic artifice. I laughed. I shed a tear. I ached. Waitt is a genius in the making. And, having watched this film for the second time (after a couple of years' gap) I am pleased to say that I enjoyed it even more than the first time round. Great stuff. I have now said all that I want to say and I am sorry but I seem to need to pad out the review with this flummery now in order to ensure that it will be posted. I simply cannot understand why I have to write any more at this point. It seems quite unnecessary. Maybe this accounts for all the plot re-hashing which appears on this website.

Premiere night in Madrid. Full house to see Chris Waitt himself (and mother) to do the introduction before the movie, with Angel Martin (the guy who dubbed him in Spanish - yes, unfortunately it was the dubbed version). "Meet my voice" said the director/actor with pure irony...The documentary starts with a simple idea: he had just broken up with another girlfriend and decides to investigate why do women always leave him. So, let's start to call of the ex's! The secret of the movie is the very good editing, the music and the extent at which he mocks himself, even up to the point where we can start to feel some pity for the poor fellow... In some points, and by being filmed the same way one tends to remember "Supersize me". I guess the auto-documentary is an easy and cheaper way to express!In the end, we leave the room with some good laughs, maybe even identified with some situations that make up man-woman relationships, but most of all, absolutely sure that to build strong relationships you must give the best out of you and try not to be a childish and selfish pig just like Chris...

There is no redeeming quality in this "film". Its a badly made film of a badly developed idea. Looking at the directors other films on IMDb it seems this is just a remake of his early fiction films. Talk about beating the same idea over and over. The whole film feels like a film school graduate who wasn't bad but at the same wasn't very good at film making and now is just a hipster wannabe screaming for attention.The director has none of the wit you get with other documentary makers and given his lack of film making skill you just get a badly filmed piece of rubbish. Only good thing I can say is I got the DVD from a friend so I at least didn't pay money for it.

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.