Originally posted on my keeps-me-from-being-homeless blog, Art Factory Hostel Blog
Well, we have now grand-opened the bar, as opposed to almost-opened, or pre-opened the bar. Or whatever. I guess Manuel was a little nervous about predicting a too auspicious opening night? He needn’t have been, because the first Movie Night on Wednesday was well-attended, if not as crowded as the same event might have been back in the summer.
Unexpectedly, the movie, The Complete History of My Sexual Failures, charmed, if not my pants off, then me out of some of my suspicions and prejudices. Ostensibly a comic documentary about a late-20s something filmmaker who wants to discover why his 30 or so girlfriends all dumped him, by interviewing all of them, it’s pretty much hilarious, and occasionally eye-popping, from start to finish, particularly the freely submitted-to testicle torture.
Still, to put it kindly, I didn’t quite believe all the setups, many of which were at least partially staged, a la Borat, and a few were simply blatantly dishonest. The most damning thing I can say about it, however, other than the myopia encapsulated in the title, is that the film’s deceptions, and the attitude towards those deceptions, finally came to seem emblematic of the filmmaker’s own foibles and failings. Within just a few minutes, it became clear why all his girlfriends dumped him, and that no matter how much he exposed himself on film, he could never quite bring himself to self-criticize in any meaningful way.
Still, that didn’t keep most of us in Art Factory’s bar from guffawing every couple of minutes. Perhaps the film’s most clever scene involved a stridently unwilling ex who was so leery of the filmmaker, and so traumatized by their relationship, that she would only agree to be in the film if she were hidden completely behind a screen. She also refused to have her own voice used and instead, used a Macintosh laptop to type the answers to his questions, allowing the computer to convert the text to speech. Now, that’s emotional distance.
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