I just found this one and since then Peter Temple has died and I also have decided since reading our other guest Nobel Laureate - Coetzee - a fellow South African immigrant like Temple - that they must have known each other - as Coetzee has an insight into Ballarat, in his 2006 novel Slow Man - and bravo Craig McLachlan for staring down that B-grade harassment charge recently - also written after the fact. As follows: -
The recent Peter Temple TV dramatisation, of the Jack Irish stories - was very impressive, even though there were a few faults in the general mise-en-scene, and let me list a few of those faults. First of all Guy Pearce, held it together, w/out him no show; the rest could hardly act , or is it because Temple gives the immigrant's view of Melbourne; the cliché-ridden world of references to Harold Holt, Southbank and Brunswick, and the film-maker's augment this with continual visuals of graffito walls, as backdrops. By deciding to live in Ballarat, Temple has saved himself from the ultimate Melbourne egocentric cliché, as this is new and original for the contained Melbourne viewer-reliant on 'worlds-mot-liveable-city' clichés that abound amongst, I assume property speculators. A few minor points: where did the key turn up from in the final scenes to get the photographic evidence, which seems to be done by a professional paparazzi with a million dollars worth of camera gear, of no less-Ministers of state in Victoria (too big a brush stroke); which is all to do with endings, trying to close down a complicated story with many threads, leads to either lazy writing and/or just losing the plot for the viewer themselves. Some of the references like Aussie Rules football, and people who live at their local pubs (day in and day out), and follow St Kilda or still follow Fitzroy and watch replays from 1994 of their 100 point loss are good but improbable; as no-one could afford to live in the public bar, at the local, next to the prices that are charged, now! And no Fitzroy fan would watch that penultimate MCG flogging, you might as well watch their very last, where the umpires gave 50 metre and 100 metre penalties, just to show 'em who was boss, out there in the wilds (as it was then) of the Perth W.A. suburb of Subiaco. As if that place where Fitzroy last played was a launching pad into their stratosphere of nostalgia.
Lastly on endings: the PO box was found via the text on the back of a Nat King Cole CD given by one of the minor protagonists to his mother and then given very generously by his mother to the Guy Pearce character - too generous from the mother of a boy who was missing and possibly murdered, and then the John Flaus character from the live-in pub (the guy who does the Cascade Tasmanian beer adverts-but is a film studies tutor, who I had in 1981 at C.A.E.) - finds the PO box on the back of the Nat King Cole CD, and says: "Nat King Cole, never came to Abbotsford to record!" Hopefully, that reference said: ( i.e. The Nat King Cole CD ) - (said) Recorded at Abbotsford and the PO box is a reference to where you can get that CD, that was recorded in Abbotsford." Otherwise, the miniscule clue would be even beyond an Agatha Christie fan. Or since writing this - a Vera fan of convoluted plots - I always find them easy - the person who hardly appeared in the initial stages is generally the murderer.
Most anti-critics, sold on this Australia's got talent across the board and not as I contend, people in our mirror-image western democracy, located in south, south east Asia, just put their hand up and say I will be a David Letterman (Steve Vizard), or an appalling Ben Elton wanna-be (The guy who does Randling etc.), would find some of these lines of critique all a bit trivial maybe, because the average viewer only wants to see the violence, and then the come-uppance, in that order. I was only interested in, whether the horse scenes made my work redundant; but Temple only has one aspect to that, and that's the putting a lot of people at the track to bet on a horse when you know another horse is going to win (to better the odds for your fancy); duh!-it is the bookies themselves that do this, perhaps not the punters, getting people to put a thou on a horse, so everyone follows suit and they don't lose money on the possibilities, that will win! In fact at a country track, i.e. Balnarring, I witnessed this! And that's a wrap.
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