In short: My Talks With Dean Spanley (2008)

Before I encountered this film from New Zealand directed by Toa Fraser, I didn’t even know there were any movie adaptations of the works of Lord Dunsany. It’s not the Pegana movie I secretly dream of, but it’s certainly a fine – and strange – little film. It’s taking place in a lovingly – and knowingly – reconstructed Edwardian Age. Fisk Junior (Jeremy Northam) a man of what was probably called great melancholy in his time, is haunted by the unspoken grief about a brother who died in the Boer War and the difficult relationship to his father, the elderly Fisk Senior (Peter O’Toole), whom he meets once a week, but with whom he doesn’t ever discuss anything of actual import to their emotional lives.

While on what goes for a spiritual quest when you are an Edwardian gentleman (that is, listening to the mindnumbingly boring lecture of a swami about reincarnation), Fisk Minor encounters the dean Spanley (Sam Neill). The dean has the somewhat peculiar habit of entering a kind of fugue state whenever he drinks Tokay, vividly remembering his past life as a dog; in roundabout ways, Fisk Minor’s fascination with this aspect of the man, and his obsession with getting the poor cleric drunk on Tokay to hear more about his life as a dog, will bring father and son Fisk together.

And really, if that description does sound intriguing rather than plain stupid to you, you’ll probably, like me, enjoy the film’s peculiar sense of irony, as well as its reconstruction of an Edwardian state of mind, and share in the special and unexpected joy of watching Sam Neill – in the most Edwardian language possible thanks to Alan Sharp’s tonally perfect script – reminisce about his time as a dog.


It’s really a lovely film, perhaps a bit too mushy and nice to its characters in the ending stretch - or I’m perhaps simply not quite as optimistic when it comes to radical change in people as the film is. It is full of lovely (that’s really the perfect word to describe this), sometimes wickedly funny, detail fitting to its time, and featuring a bunch of actors (Bryan Browne and Judy Parfitt are in there, too) doing justice to what really is a pretty damn peculiar project. That the film isn’t ever turning its plot wild and wacky is another of its virtues – this is one of those endeavours that take a preposterous thing, realize that one of the great things in the movies is to turn a preposterous thing into something tangible and real, and use it with dignity and love.

On the Border (1998)

Warning: I do vaguely discuss some of the film’s plot twists!

A couple of years after an involvement in a bank heist gone wrong, Jake Barnes (Casper Van Dien) is working as a bank guard in a tiny town on the US side of the US/Mexican border. He’s not leading a boring life, though, because he spends his free time having an affair with Rosa (Rochelle Swanson), the wife of his very sweaty boss Ed (Daniel Baldwin). To make matters more interesting, the couple is planning on ripping off the bank in a couple of days, for while there’s usually little worth the risk of robbing it inside, this coming Saturday, there will be a whole load of mafia money locked up in there.

There are – of course – complications. For one, Ed’s gotten the idea Rosa is indeed cheating on him and wants Jake to find out who it is. As it will turn out, Jake and Rosa aren’t the only ones who want that sweet sweet mafia money, either. One Barry Montana (Bryan Brown), probably the guy for whom the phrase “toxic masculinity” was termed, is rather interested in the money too. Barry sics his private slave Kristen (Camilla Overbye Roos) on Jake to seduce him and convince him to partner up for the robbery.

Jake does realize that Kristen’s supposed to be a honey pot, yet he still feels drawn to her, as she seems to be to him. She does, after all, have a probably perfectly true horrible story about her being sold to Barry to tell, and seems to only want to get away from the arsehole and out of the life. Because that’s not trouble enough for one film, Jake’s former partner in the old heist that worked out very badly indeed, a completely crazy person called Sykes (Bentley Mitchum), is lurking around the plot’s edges, trying to get an angle. And here I thought robbing a bank was easy.

Going by the IMDB, Bob Misiorowski’s sleazy, pulpy little neo noir is a TV movie, though going by the filming style and the rather large amount of nudity and sex in it, it must have been made for HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime. It’s a proper neo noir (though one with a genre-atypical ending), however, the sexy bits not being the only important parts of the film, unlike in the neo noir’s sleazier little sister, the erotic cable TV thriller. There is, however, indeed a lot more sex and nudity in this one than it would strictly need for its plot. It is pretty much equal opportunity nudity, though, so there’s quite a bit of Van Dien’s qualities in addition to the female nudity on display, too.

I suspect one’s liking for On the Border will have a lot to do with one’s tolerance for films that attempt to include basically all the tropes and clichés of a given genre, for broad acting, as well as for Caspar Van Dien’s sex face, the last being not pretty. This is not what anyone would call an intelligently constructed thriller, rather it is one that just heaps complications and plot threads on its poor protagonist, half of which will acquire stupid yet also highly entertaining twist in the final ten minutes. It’s the “throw as much as possible at the audience, logic be damned” approach, something which doesn’t generally end in films that make much sense. But then I’m a bit of a sucker for simple stories made absurdly complicated, as I am for film that wallow in genre tropes as much as this one does. Sometimes, it’s simply enjoyable to watch a dance you know by heart even though its steps are obfuscated by a whole load of weird hand gestures and mumbling.

Even better, Misiorowski actually gets around to twisting some of the genre tropes of the neo noir, sometimes even in fun ways. So the horrible fake accent you roll your eyes over does indeed turn out to be fake, one of the film’s two femme fatales (why have one when you can have to in a film, right?) isn’t actually one, and the film’s solution does use the general way movies tend to side-line their Mexican characters for a little surprise. Now, before anyone thinks too much of these elements, they are still embedded in a whole lot of sleaze and violence. As I like it.

It would be terribly remiss of me if I ended this without mentioning On the Border’s fine bunch of caricature villains. I can’t imagine living a life where one wouldn’t enjoy a pretty paunchy Daniel Baldwin sweating and being sleazy towards his wife and prostitutes and babbling nonsense about simple being stupid. Or Bryan Brown’s lovely portrayal of a perfect caricature of a vile man (without the Australian accent, I’d put a Trump joke right here). Or how Bentley Mitchum’s minor villain is all twitchiness, verbal tics and drug-fuelled craziness, just one step away from becoming a circus geek.


On the Border is the neo noir interpreted as a sleazy, fun low budget movie, and even though that is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, it sure is mine.