A Complete History of My Sexual Failures

Thursday night-

A Complete History of My Sexual Failures

- in which despondent film-maker Chris Waitt, feeling like Britain's Most Dumped after yet another relationship breakdown, decides to track down every girl he's ever had any kind of involvement with and find out why they ditched him.

I would hazard a guess that most people have thought of doing this at some point in their lives. Or maybe it's a guy thing. A dumped guy thing. While writers like Nick Hornby, Ben Elton and Nick Earls have explored this territory through fiction, Chris Waitt decided to do it for real.

His attempts to reconnect with his past and fix his present take him through an odyssey of awkward scenarios. Chris unshamedly puts himself in cringe worthy situations, from confrontations with hostile exes, to blind dates, to begging for sex on the street, to a visit to a dominatrix's dungeon to have his attitude to women "corrected". It's rough and ready film making, with many sequences filmed on webcam, or "video diary" style by Chris himself, but it never fails to be amusing.

However, as riotously funny as this film is, it doesn't sit quite right. Partly, it's a dirty feeling at so much Schadenfreude in one hit. But it's also because the film raises questions that it neglects to answer in its pursuit of laughs.

For starters, after ten minutes watching Waitt on camera, the question the audience wants to know is not why all his former girlfriends broke up with him but why they were with him in the first place. Chris Waitt is essentially Shaggy from Scooby Doo but without a cool talking dog. To add to this, the camera constantly shows him at his worst for comic effect, which makes him seem caricatured, the embodiment of the Undateable Man. Clearly he isn't that - he does have, after all, a very long list of former girlfriends - and there are other way in which his onscreen persona doesn't add up. The character you see on screen is a man with a painful lack of self-awareness. Yet this same man apparently directed a film which knowingly highlights this lack. There is something calculated about the way Waitt presents, which means that for all the personal material in the film (and there is some very brave personal material) I still felt like I was watching a performance.

Complete History is Waitt's first documentary, his previous work having been mostly in comedy. This background clearly rubs off on this film. It is like a romance version of Jackass, drawing on the same "hey, watch me do dumb shit" appeal. It does succeed very well on that level - it has been a long time since I sat in a cinema with a crowd reacting to what they see on screen so energetically, whether it was belly laughs or groans of horror. Still, I can't help but feel that there is a dimension of character exploration which this film only dips its toe in when it really needs to dive.

Rock n Roll Nerd

They say in show business, success is all about who you know and being in the right place at the right time. The same can be true for documentary. When Rhian Skirving started making a film about her friend Tim, a struggling cabaret performer, she probably thought she was making a simple character piece, not a rise to fame story in the vein of a classic rock biopic.

When Tim Minchin finally did break onto the world comedy scene, with his eccentric appearance, like a caricature of a rock god, and his irreverent musical comedy, he took off like wildfire. And Rhian Skirving happened to be there with a camera recording him, from his first decision to change his image in what comes across as almost a last ditch attempt to get recognised, through his uncertain early tours to his current sell-out success. Now that's timing.

>> Speaking of timing, mine was totally off last night. The movie was at 9.30 and I was finished everything I had to do by 6. Going home and back in would have been crowded but three hours in Melbourne city on a rainy evening with no money seems very very long. I spent most of it wondering how chestnut selling could possibly be a viable industry, as I have never seen or heard of anyone buying them. <<

You've probably seen a zillion biopics about how musicians made it big. The difference with Rock n Roll Nerd is that it follows Tim's rise in fortunes as it happens, not in retrospect. This gives the story an immediacy and insight that is usually lacking in zero to hero stories. Even the most well crafted artist biopic is tinged with the knowledge of the successful artist's public persona. This film, having been started before Tim's public persona really existed, and shot by someone who had known him for years before he was anything like famous, breaks through that barrier. It's funny, of course, because it's got Tim Minchin in it, but it's also remarkably touching, as well as giving an inside view of the back end of the comedy business. All in all, a rocking film.

>> Timing timing timing, I thought as I was heading home. Like if I started filming one of my artist friends now perhaps and then they... but my own personal timing was still way off. As I was going to sit down on the tram, half way seated in fact, a wiry little man nipped in and sat in the seat my bum was aiming for. I was left in the awkward position of having to straighten back up and find another seat. He had as much right to the seat as anyone I guess, and I wasn't 100% in it, but still it was odd. <<

Cartoon Rabbit

The Melbourne International Film Festival sounds like an illustrious kind of affair when you pronounce its full title. When you pronounce only its acronym, MIFF, it sounds like a bunny rabbit from a children's cartoon. How people manage to say it with any gravitas is beyond me but they do.

Oddly I've never been to MIFF much, because it clashes with Byron Bay Writer's Festival and this time of year normally sees me heading north for my annual beach, ideas and organic coffee fix. This year though I'm doing the whole MIFF experience. Starting last night with the Documentary Shorts Program.

MIFF's Shorts definitely sounds like a children's cartoon. Being documentary there were no cartoon rabbits although there were, perhaps surprisingly, both cartoons and rabbits. Animation in doco is a bit of a hip trend and the night saw two films that made heavy use of it. Cyanosis intersected animations in and out of observational footage to represent the world as seen by a delusional brain-damaged painter, using the nightmarish visions from his paintings to weave a semi-imaginary landscape around him. Under Construction took place mostly in a virtual landscape representing now demolished suburbs of a Chinese city, with real footage appearing only in fleeting ghost like images. Animation as memory, in this case, a representation of the forgotten rather than the imaginary. In both cases they were powerful tools, but also in both cases they were slightly overused and even I, who am a great fan of animated documentary, found myself hankering for a greater dose of reality.

Rabbits in documentary are not quite as hip but they still put in a showing in Szmolinsky. Szmolinsky is the German guy who breeds giant rabbits and was planning to sell them to Korea to alleviate food shortages there. The film centred around, a) surprising you with how giant the giant rabbits were, and b) the scandal over him selling them to Korea where it was assumed they would end up in inhumane farms. Apparently, I've discovered following up the story on the net, they never got to any farms but all got eaten by Kim Jong-Il and his closest cronies in a banquet... not that any of that got covered in the film, which cut off at the five minute mark, feeling a bit like something created for assessment.

The much hyped A Triumphant Tale I know for a fact was created for assessment, because it was produced out of the same course I'm doing. A tale of two bakers competing in a vanilla slice contest, it was built up big but ended up being a bit vanilla itself, and rather heavily iced with stylistic devices that didn't suit the tone or subject matter of the film. City of Cranes also bore the name of a film school in its credits, and its four chapter structure looked suspiciously like a student film that had been expanded, but was by far the most visually arresting film of the night. A portrait of tower crane operators in London, it soared on the strength of its wonderful photography. The cranes and the city they looked down on were the stars, while the interviews with the crane operators played only a supporting role, the human voices serving primarily to remind you of the human presence in the cranes and to stop it being a film only about machines. By contrast, Mimi and Vali was visually more restricted, being about two elderly sisters living together in a cluttered house, but got by on sheer strength of character. Using only interviews and observation of the ladies at home it still managed to be the most emotionally affecting film in the program.

Dirty Pictures by John Smith used even less devices. In fact it used none at all. Not even editing or plot. This British guy sat in a hotel room in Bethlehem, filmed the roof and spoke about his day. Later, he started filming the rest of his room - tea cups, cupboards, his bags, his shoes. For the first half, this was far more entertaining than it should have been but towards the end he was stretching it a bit. Apparently John Smith (if that IS his real name) does this in hotel rooms all around the world.

This was the first of our class group outings to the festival and we later dissected them all in a bar on the riverbank. Some loved all the animation, some hated it; people were alternately tickled or confused by the giant rabbits; others were nearly ready to put a contract on the head of John Smith. There is always a feeling I get at these group things like there is a bunch of film-makers out doing something and I'm the tag-along fraud. I always find this. Among actors I feel like a writer out of his depth, among writers I feel like a film-maker out of his genre, among film-makers I feel like an actor with pretensions. Sometimes I feel like a lost public servant but then again in the public service I felt even more out of touch, like a cartoon character trying to fit into an otherwise verite style documentary. Somewhere someone's watching going, "No no that character's totally inappropriate for this story. This isn't working at all. Two stars."

A Heavy Layer of Virtual Dust

Last post, October 2006. This blog has lain pretty much undisturbed since then. You could blow the dust off it. Except it would be virtual dust, whatever digital accretion gathers to unaccessed memory. I imagine it as a layer of faded greying electrons, washed up on a disused circuit along with ancient undeleted emails, unopened e-newsletters and drifts of old spam. As the browser disturbs them, like an intruder's breath, they scatter into the air and sparkle briefly like motes of true dust in a sunbeam. All this happens unseen, of course, lost and microscopic in the vast depths of some anonymous server.

The thing exposed, like anything that needs dust blown off it, is an obscure artefact with a faint patina of sentiment and no conceivable purpose. Did I really write a travel blog? Who for? I'm quite sure no one read it. And were my travel adventures really as unadventurous as they appear in retrospect? I suppose they were. My main memories of that trip comprise of wandering wet and heartbroken around Vancouver and my lung nearly exploding as I climbed a mountain. I'm not exactly waiting on someone to offer me a movie deal for my story.

I have a theory about blogs, and diaries and all kinds of personal record that you only keep them when you're not really doing anything. I mean if you were actually doing stuff you wouldn't have time to sit down and tell yourself about the day you just had, would you? You'd be too busy. So the only things that get recorded are everybody's in-between times, their idle musings, daily nothings and minutely described inactivity. When future generations clear the dust, real and virtual, out of long abandoned servers and painstakingly recreate the data of our time, they will reach the conclusion that we were all a bunch of idle whingers, who never DID anything.

Except maybe review films. Which is what I'm going to dedicate this blog to now. In theory. If you're a member of a future generation and this is the last post, then you'll know I was only making idle promises. Or else that I went and did something amazing and didn't have time to tell myself.