The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick (2001)

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

I just watched this "documentary". I'm at a loss for words to express anything good about this piece... Which can only be described as a high school quality, steaming pile of sh!t. It pains me to say something so harsh about a documentary, because I usually love documentaries. I don't usually write reviews, but felt it necessary to warn others who might want to learn about Philip K. Dick. This low budget mistake is a dis-service and will turn watchers off to PKD through sheer boredom- which I can only assume is the exact opposite of what the producers had originally intended. Speaking of producers... Mark Steensland and Andy Massagli give credit to themselves no less than 6 TIMES EACH in the opening/closing credits for this festering ball of cat vomit . One of them lists himself as "Camera Director"... Which consists entirely of placing a camera on a tripod with seemingly no regard for lighting, then making sure that camera NEVER moves. Bravo. Unrated and uninteresting, this is an hour and 21 minutes I can't get back. Not only that, but what a horrible loogey to hock on such a great writer as PKD. Thanks a lot. In contrast, the episode of Prophets of Science Fiction dedicated to PKD is excellent! And the camera moves. And Ridley Scott doesn't credit himself 6 times... Although, he deserves it far more than these hacks. Thank you, drive-thru.

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.

After watching this "film" i was moved to seek out the fiction ofPhillip K. Dick.So that's a good thing....Dick comes of as an interesting writerworthy of further study.The filmmakers, however, have assembled the material within insuch a fey, self-satisfied and fanboy-esque ineptitude that i foundmyself, after a time, staring out the window and listening, ratherthan watching the amateurishly-assembled and shot interviewfootage or (especially) the amazingly ill-conceived "animated"scene breaks. The people responsible for this have no idea offilm-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 ideafrom the material within. But, as film-making, this is an amateurishembarrassment.

Except for choosing the most fascinating subject to "document" (the brilliant author Philip K. Dick), the "filmmakers" of TGATPKD manage to do everything else wrong. This SOV (shot on video) documentary is so devoid of form and style that what little substance remains is not worth muddling through this disaster to see and hear. The location sound is terrible, the videography pedestrian, and worst of all, the pace of the editing is atrocious. These (so called) "filmmakers" let their interviewees go on and on and on and on and on and on, not employing the simplest of editing techniques: crosscutting between interviewees to "edit" what they've said to encapsulate a topic point in sections to build towards a cohesive whole. Surprise-surprise: editing is not just slapping a bunch of footage together. I too could go on and on and on about how abysmal the editing is, but suffice it to say this TGATPKD feels like it was "edited" by a group of public access trainees. The opening credits sequence is super-weak "animation" that goes on forever; but what's worse is that this "animation" continues throughout the "film" as a means to give form to the late author, who was (sound) recorded in a previous interview. And the constant quasi-futuristic background music (I dare not call it a score) that persists from beginning to end is so awful that if it isn't stock library background music (usually used for corporate videos or local cable commercials), then the amateur(s) who wrote and recorded it should be ashamed. THIS "FILM" IS THE REASON WHY I CAN'T CONVINCE MOST OF MY FRIENDS THAT DOCUMENTARIES DON'T ACTUALLY STINK AND AREN'T ALL BORING. TGATPKD is proof that if there is a built-in audience for the subject matter that any given filmmaker (the makers of TGATPKD are certainly not filmmakers -- hacks is more like it) sets out to EXPLOIT, said filmmaker will find a distributor, no matter how bad their "film" is.