The Penultimate Truth About Philip K. Dick (2007 Video) User Reviews

A Fine Dickumentary

[ferbs54 · 7/10 · 17 May 2010]

A documentary on the life of cult author Philip K. Dick...shouldn't that be called a Dickumentary? Well, whatever you choose to call it, 2008's "The Penultimate Truth About Philip K. Dick" should certainly manage to please fans of this great writer. At 88 minutes, it is hardly an in-depth affair, and inveterate Dickheads may come away with a sense of having gleaned nothing new. But for the average Dick admirer, like me, who has read a dozen or so of the man's books, is aware of the outlines of his life and wants to know more, the picture should prove invaluable. The film is fairly authoritative, managing to incorporate interviews with 16 people who knew Phil very well, including his 2nd, 3rd and 5th wife (Kleo, Anne and Tessa), his stepdaughter Tandi Ford, fellow writers Ray Nelson, Tim Powers and Dan O'Bannon, his therapist Barry Spatz, and a bunch of girlfriends and high school buddies. These talking heads serve to give an honest and well-rounded picture of the often troubled, often brilliant author. What the film doesn't do is go into the books themselves, and so those looking to better understand the Ubik spray can or the Jungian subtext in "A Maze of Death," for example, are advised to look elsewhere. As for the framing device in the film that seems to bother so many (government researchers examining Dick's life), well, it is certainly no more silly or offensive than the framing device in the recent Doors doc "When You're Strange," with Jim Morrison driving in the desert and listening to reports of his own demise. I found this Dickumentary to be very entertaining and informative, actually, and only wish that the filmmakers could have included Phil's Metz, France speech in its entirety, rather than just the snippets that are shown. Video footage of this fascinating personality is rare enough, and more would have been better. Quibbles aside, though, this is a perfect film for all Dick admirers to watch in the privacy of their own conapt....

Not awful but marred by silly pseudo-FBI framing device

[bmoore-13 · 6/10 · 19 September 2009]

Most fans will wish for a more thoughtful bio documentary on the great SF writer Philip K. Dick. This is only one of several bio films on Dick; the only other comparable film I've seen is PKD; A Day in the Afterlife from 1994, and while it's not perfect either, it's considerably better than this film. The worst thing about this film is its silly framing device: a couple of FBI types in a darkened room examine tapes and dossiers on Dick to determine whether the writer experienced psychic episodes. This only serves to cheapen the subject. Take this away, and what's left is not bad, in its way. We receive accounts of Dick from old friends, fellow writers (though no one most viewers will be familiar with) and, most prominently, several of Dick's wives and girlfriends. (He was married six times in his relatively brief life.) We learn of the death of his twin sister at the age of five weeks--a loss that haunted him throughout his life; we learn of his impoverished existence in the fifties in Berkeley (living at times on cat food); we see his developing paranoia, the result of drugs and, likely, heredity; and his psychiatrist appears to give us inside info on private sessions. (Does this violate something, somehow?) The clips of Dick himself are few and far between, but we get a few snippets of his strange, if not disastrous, speech in France in 1977. We learn somewhere between nothing and very little about the fiction he wrote, but we can go elsewhere for that (K.S. Robinson's book, SF Studies articles, etc.). So this is a real mixed bag, worth seeing, but just that.

A Bio-Documentary of Phil Dick

[gavin6942 · 6/10 · 7 February 2014]

Not sure what to make of this. For what seems like a relatively lower budget documentary, they did alright and put things on the record for fans and historians to judge.

Another reviewer had a problem with the "silly framing device", and I have to agree. Why do we have FBI agents listening to recordings? Instead, we could have cut that cheesy stuff and maybe threw in people reading from actual FBI documents involving Dick -- some wild stuff out there.

Overall, they had some good interviews and it was especially great to get a bit of Dan O'Bannon on film. This is not the best Dick film out there, but for fans it may have to be essential just the same. I would love to see one serious one combining the clips of each and adding something new.