Legendary sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick is the fascinating subject of a documentary that plumbs the dark corners of the tortured writer's life. Five failed marriages, excessive drug addictions and intense delusions (which included the belief that he was living parallel existences) possessed Dick's life, eventually wrecking his health and speeding him to a premature demise. Sounds like the fodder for one of Dick's short stories.
Anyone with less than an encyclopedic knowledge of Dick's work will leave this film clueless as to what the Gospel According to Philip K. Dick might actually be.
Dallies too briefly with Dick's writing, and too expansively with speculations about what Dick may or may not have experienced in February and March of 1974.
Spliced in are some really cheap animation segments and monotonous techno analog music, along with, alas, only the merest flashes of Dick's self-deprecating wit.
The few bizarre stories of Phil's life that are provided in this film, and the goofy animated sequences also included ... don't effectively sell the author to the public.
I don't know a lot about Philip K. Dick's personal life and this was not a good place to start. The film begins by discussing a break-in at Dick's house where "something" was stolen from a safe. Not knowing the author's history it took me a long time to understand why this was at all significant. Also, the device of an
animated man writing on a typewriter and then having the camera show what he'd written was very cumbersome and slowed down the film.I didn't finish watching this one. Maybe I'll come back to it after I'm more familiar with the author.
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