Jeanskynebu
the audience applauded
GamerTab
That was an excellent one.
Dynamixor
The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
manch44
I have read a great deal of Phillip Dick's work and was looking forward to seeing this. Hoo-boy, was THAT a mistake. The audio interviews of Mr. Dick were equalized/engineered so badly as to be unintelligible. The animated character that was shown during the audio interviews of Mr. Dick was at best laughable and at worst disrespectful. Mix the typewriter crap animation (mentioned in other reviews) with the cheesiest synthesizer soundtrack I have ever heard and you have a product that would drive Mother Teresa to walk into an orphanage with a fully loaded street-sweeper and open fire. This pathetic attempt at a documentary is almost criminal. Paraphrasing another reviewer here, it is a shame that one of the greatest writers of the last century gets this kind of treatment. Amen.
auteurus
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
tedg
Spoilers herein.I corresponded with PKD during his flowering period. He was an amazingly reflective mind: someone like Nash (with whom he was also communicating) who could deeply engineer his alternative existences. He had completely and utterly merged this arbitrary parallelism with the ambiguities of the word: the reader and writer, the writer and character, the creator and character, the character as creator, the word and meaning in all this.That is his genius, something he explored with other writers, but few scifi ones, and with an appalling, exhilarating fearlessness and personal investment. We do have some clever films that have resulted and a strangely stupid fan base. Some of those fans, parasites and acquaintances conspired to create this documentary.As you no doubt know, this is poor, even annoying, in terms of production values. That would be tolerable if anything interesting were conveyed. But though some of these people knew him, they are all completely uninteresting and apparently never tuned into the man's juice.Ted's evaluation: 1 of 4 -- You can probably find something better to do with this part of your life.
hipcheck
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.
