Down Under Flix

  Whilst I have not crunched the numbers in any conclusive way, I would wager the ratio of major modern Australian directors to tackle period films is quite high. This predilection is not unique among national cinemas, but it is noteworthy, and explicable for a few reasons: the adaptation of canonical (on a curve) literature in the 1970s to legitimate the burgeoning film industry, the extension of this into television miniseries (e.g. For the Term of His Natural Life , Robbery Under Arms ) in the 1980s, the cultural brand recognition carried by the ANZACs and Ned Kelly, and the 21st century turn towards murkier revisionist histories, among other things. Off the top of my head, Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Fred Schepisi, Phillip Noyce, John Duigan, Simon Wincer, Richard Franklin, Rolf De Heer, Scott Hicks, Andrew Dominik, Gregor Jordan, Justin Kurzel, Warwick Thornton, Rachel Perkins, Kiev Stenders, and Jennifer Kent have all tackled period assi...

  Tom Selleck, as an affable mid-tier movie star, was an affordable muse for Australian filmmakers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, working under Bruce Beresford on Her Alibi , Simon Wincer on Quigley , and Fred Schepisi on Mr Baseball (1992) . The last of these titles was one of the umpteen American baseball comedies that pervaded multiplexes in the 1990s — see also the Major League films, A League of Their Own , Angels in the Outfield , The Sandlot Kids , Cobb , Rookie of the Year , The Scout , Ed , and so on — with Kevin Costner’s great trio of baseball films ( Bull Durham , Field of Dreams , For Love of the Game ) bookending the era. Despite my admiration for Schepisi, I'd never seen Mr Baseball before now, and my dominant point of reference for the film   was a line in Bruce Beresford’s book There’s a Fax from Bruce , where the director laments local media jabs at his newest release: “Very nice of the SMH to note the bad reviews for my film. Did they do the same for ...