The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick

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.

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.

After watching this "film" i was moved to seek out the fiction of

Phillip K. Dick.

So that's a good thing....Dick comes of as an interesting writer

worthy of further study.

The filmmakers, however, have assembled the material within in

such a fey, self-satisfied and fanboy-esque ineptitude that i found

myself, after a time, staring out the window and listening, rather

than watching the amateurishly-assembled and shot interview

footage or (especially) the amazingly ill-conceived "animated"

scene breaks. The people responsible for this have no idea of

film-making or pacing; had they no idea of how the silly, repetitive

"animated" scene breaks would grind everything to a halt? Jesus.

If you want to learn more about Dick, fine...you can get some idea

from the material within. But, as film-making, this is an amateurish

embarrassment.

As a certifiable "Dick-head," I bought this docu in the hopes it might shed some additional light on one of the greatest purveyors of sci-fi and American literature in general. Dick was a brilliant -- a superlative I seldom use -- man. His stories were fascinating meditations on what constitutes reality, self, etc. Sadly, this docu is a cheapo featuring some nice interviews with Dick friends and fans (could have done without the fans, who while sincere didn't seem that knowledgeable or at the very least interesting).

Most distracting -- and reeking of padding -- are the "animated" segments. Truly awful. I assume they were done in Flash, but they are static beyond belief. I speed-scanned through them all.

Dick deserves a fine documentary. This isn't it. Read Lawrence Sutin's bio if you seek info on Dick. Or read Paul Williams' interviews with the man. Skip this sorry effort.

Poor documentary of this sci-fi great explores houses he used to live in here in the bay area (with the webmasters of PKD websites as guides) and other irrelevant details while failing to really explore what makes his writing unique. But then, if I wanted to know that, I guess I'd pick up one of his books (which I often like to do). This film is for people who are not Philip K. Dick fans, but might have seen "Total Recall" or "Blade Runner" or "Minority Report" (the worst one yet.... or wasn't there something with Gary Senise or whatever his name is? Hopefully that got shelved) and they want to know what this guy's about, but they don't know how to read. For those people and no one else, this film is recommended.

Not recommended for fans of PKD: you won't find out anything you don't already know.

p.s. just reading through my comments from years ago here in 2008 and wanted to point out that I did actually see "Imposter" with Gary Sinise and it was one of the more decent Philip Dick movies relatively speaking. At least Sinise isn't some kind of superman or supermodel, he looks like a "dickian" hero.