Cinematical points us to an indie film (also featuring Peter O’Toole, in addition to those in the excerpt below) that premiered at the Toronto Independent Film Festival earlier this week: “…Dean Spanley, a wonderfully charming and whimsical comedy about an Anglican priest who believes he is the reincarnation of a dog.”
A New Zealand production, the film is set in England near the turn of the last century, a time when manners and social graces were all-important, and when a man could say “Poppycock!” and truly mean it. A well-to-do bachelor named Fisk (Jeremy Northam) is more open-minded than most of his contemporaries, and he finds that a local minister, Dean Spanley (Sam Neill), when plied with a certain rare and expensive brandy, will speak freely of his memories of being a canine before he was born into his current existence.
What will those wacky New Zealanders think of next? Read the rest of the review (witty! lovely! oscar-wilde-ish!) here — it is the second film reviewed on the page. There is also a podcasted interview with Bill Maher, whose “docu-comedy” “Religulous” also premiered at the event, here.
And for those on the other end of the obscure film spectrum of taste (or who want to see Hercules in a dog collar), there’s always Kevin Sorbo, playing an Episcopal priest/action hero in the Sci-Fi Channel B-eco-horror flop “Something Beneath,” which apparently came out on DVD this week.