The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick

I want to make my review a riff on another review, written by Kurt Winter of New Jersey. He starts off by saying, "If I weren't already a PKD fan ... this docuflick would do absolutely nothing for me." And that is the very heart of the problem here. If I did not know who Phil Dick was, I would not have learned it from this film. When was he born? When did he die? Where did he grow up? These things are never stated.

Winter writes, "While it was certainly informative, it could have been edited better, and could have been more broad." I completely agree, especially with the editing. Sometimes the different voices blend together to tell a story, sometimes they seem poorly connected. And the segue from one spot to the next is weak.

More charismatic people to interview, or at least an eloquent narrator, would have helped a great deal. Just showing clips from people who knew Dick does not really tell the story. These people should be used to support the story, not be the backbone. The younger guys with websites seem completely out of place and even if their words are true, they come off as amateur.

But, hey, if you are a Dick fan and want to hear his friends -- including Robert Anton Wilson and the author of "They Live" -- this is worth checking out.

It's possible for a low budget fan documentary to be good, even interesting. Ed Wood and Jack Nance fans have made low budget documentaries about their respective topics which, although flawed, still held my interest.

The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick however, is not such a documentary as it fails on almost every level. There is no archival material of Dick and little biographical info. The director appears more obsessed with Dick's visions and drug use rather than his incredible talent.

The only appearance of Dick himself is muffled audio over a typewriter animation. The annoying animation is repeated ad nauseum, quickly becomes very grating and had me reaching for the fast forward on the remote. Even a still photo of Dick with the voiceover would have been better than this pathetic attempt.

The production quality is poor, with shaky camera work, bad sound and music that ranges from jarringly bad techno to lame piano. The interviews are the highlight of the film, but even they are repetitive and many border on pointless (e.g. the librarian giving a tour of the Phillip K Dick collection, which is basically a tour of a bookshelf). Would it have killed the film makers to identify who they are actually interviewing, and what their relationship to Dick was?

Even hardcore Phillip K Dick fans would gain little from watching this. Most people would be hard pressed to watch it at all. The most disappointing aspect is that Dick is one of the seminal writers of his generation, and his legacy deserves much better than this weak effort.

2/10

While I enjoyed listening to the handful of people that are interviewed, this is a seriously shoddy effort. No other documentary filmmaker is going to be in fear of being overshadowed by Mark Steensland. He has no narration, no biographical information, no archival footage (of which I have seen and know of PKD on a couple of talkshows), nothing to cut away to from the talking heads, and when he does show a magazine cover and article header they are flashed so quickly that you don't even have a chance to see it without hitting the freezeframe button and not even a PHOTOGRAPH of the man on the box or in the "film"! There are a couple of sound-bites from a wealth of taped interviews that are played with a poorly animated cartoon PKD lip-synching along. This animated PKD also serves to break up the material into sections with looooong animations of him getting paper, inserting it in a typewriter, typing a bit, pulling the paper out of the typewriter and laying the sheet down with one sentence on it. This repeated three times to complete the preface to the section. After seeing this animated sequence that makes South Park look like the height of technological wizardry, it wears REALLY thin. I had to resort to fast forwarding through the animations to get on with the damn thing. Still, the interviews were semi-cool - except for the real lack of information they provide and the somewhat derogatory way in which they are presented. Steensland claims to be a fan, but obviously has no interest in providing any back ground, history, or any details about Dick's life, except for a handfull of moments that portray him as a drug-addled lunatic. This should have been an incredible tribute and biography of a brilliant man, but it is neither. It's so poorly done that it makes the entire documentary genre look bad and will not make anyone want to read Dick's books if they haven't already.

PKD is a good subject for a documentary, but this piece is hampered by a lack of visual stimulus, a slow-starting narrative, and especially an overload of silly graphics.

The content starts getting intriguing and compelling about half-way through, but it takes some time to get there, a shame, since it seems that there is plenty of material to start off this direction at a much earlier point. In addition to this, there is a sequence of CGI that is repeated again and again, that is painful to watch, but is unrelenting. Although removing it would make this a very short documentary, it is cruel to leave in.

All that said, if you're a fan, you might as well watch it, there is plenty of interest, especially if you thought Jason Koornick was a spazz in grade school.

Rambling chatter about Philip K Dick, best known for the novels that became Minority Report, Blade Runner and Screamers. The chatter is loosely grouped together by subject but it drifts back and forth through many subjects. Its interesting to listen to but a bit tough to watch.

The trouble is that this is nothing more than interviews with people who knew Dick talking, inter-cut with some audio interview footage spiced up with cartoon of Dick at the typewriter. There is almost nothing other than the interviews themselves, no photos, some fleeting shots of printed material and of the outside of Dick's house. There is no narration, no attempt to explain any of the works he wrote or of his life, its simply remembrances that will mean nothing to anyone who has never read any of his books or, more importantly, never heard any of the stories of the man. My Dad who watched this with me was totally bewildered because he didn't know about Dick's life.

If you want an introduction to Philip K Dick and his work go somewhere else, this will put you off him forever. If you already know the man you may want to rent this, and then do something else while listening to it since its a dull thing to watch, but an interesting thing to listen to since the stories told are quite funny assuming you have some context to understand the craziness of them.