Rating: 
Summary: Yeah, yeah, - all that and more. Even an electric cooled
Review: pony harness, pony harness, pony harness.Who cares. It is Phil. And even if incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with Phil, there are enough of us out there who are that it is worthwhile for us. You want a documentary that will introduce - really introduce Phil to the great unwashed? It ain't gonna happen. If one is not exposed to Phil's work at an innocent enough age then it will not become the life-changing, life-enhancing, life-affirming experience it could and should be. This doesn't imply any lack of greatness. Just that a certain greatness can't be apprehended after a level of cynicism has set in. And even with an open mind, the writer certainly won't be understood without reading the books. I find the low-tech, geek-oriented aesthetic rather charming and down to earth. (Hmm. THAT's a weird thing to have said about Phil.) You'd rather see Jurassic Park-level visual quality in a documentary about Michael Crichton? Don't think so. And, of course, there were references to The Dark Haired Girl....
Rating: 
Summary: horrible
Review: probably one of the worst documentaries ever made. Fans of PKD will be extremely disappointed, beginners won't find it useful.
Better buy books of PKD if you're really interested. I highly reccommend "Ubik", "The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" and "A Scanner Darkly".
Rating:
Summary: Interesting discussions, abysmal production
Review: Some day Philip K. Dick may get the documentary he deserves, one that gives us the life and the works; unfortunately, this isn't it. "The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick" is, at best, the first step. And while I appreciate the effort put into making this film, as well as the astute contributions by interviewees, this is a seriously flawed production, and does, indeed, seem like a college project hamstrung by a commensurate lack of funding.
For instance, as the director was unable to use any actual video of PKD, he hit upon the idea of using a cartoon version of PKD to segue from one "segment" to the next and also as a vehicle to present a garbled, and at times, indiscernible PKD speaking in a audio taped interview, without, however, the benefit of subtitles. As Elvis Mitchell noted in his review of the movie for the NY Times, the "animated version of Dick behind the typewriter, which suggests a low budget version of the Cryptkeeper ......underscores the minimal amount of money the filmmakers had (reportedly about $10,000) to finish the project, which was shot on videotape and feels even more cheaply done than an episode of "Biography" on A&E." (3/2/2001) Back in the day the Learning Channel actually aired a worthwhile series called "The Great Books;" it would be interesting to imagine what they might have done with Philip K. Dick.
To note that too much of the viewer's time is wasted watching mind-numbing repetitions of the same minimalist animation overlaid with a god-awful techno soundtrack that no one in their right mind should be subjected to would be to belabor the obvious. Suffice it to say that before long I was muting and then fast-forwarding through the animated segments.
Insofar as the dvd bonus features package goes, forget about it. They simply recycle comments already presented in the film. So there is nothing new except for the interview with the director and the definitions of a half dozen key terms in the late oeuvre. Big deal.
Given the fact that some half dozen of PKD's stories have been made into movies (with more reputedly on the way), its high time for a full scale documentary. This "Gospel" may be a first attempt, but PKD deserves better.
Rating: 
Summary: World of Philip K. Dick fascinating, but not this DVD
Review: The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick explores some of this fascinating man's life and works, but ultimately fails at being an interesting movie. The interviews are okay, but there's nothing here that can't be found elsewhere where you can learn more. The often repetitious animation of PKD mouthing his actual dialogue gets to be grating and the audio isn't very clear either. An old fan of PKD will be bored watching this, a new fan might get interested enough to pursue other biographies and want to read more of his works.
Rating:
Summary: Good interviews, Bad Movie
Review: There's nothing "charmingly minimalist" about this movie. Perhaps we can say it's "charmingly poorly edited" or "charmingly void of grounding", but even this is a stretch. The blaring and "low-fi" techno music, for instance, might be "charming" to me, were it not counterintuitive to the length of the single-shot interview scenes. The interviews themselves are only loosely structured to give an idea of the last years of PKD's life, but even that structure is muddled by overwrought anecdotes and non-sequitors. The human warmth that came across in some of these interviews are really the only valuable thing about this movie, but it seems like the filmmakers were trying their hardest to undermine that quality to turn this into some sort underground geek-punk documentary. Picture a woman relaying to the camera how much she misses Phil, or relaying a touching anecdote about his irreverend and conforting sense of humor,all while irritating fast-paced garage-techno blares in your ear. See the problem?
Rating:
Summary: Good interviews, Bad Movie
Review: There's nothing "charmingly minimalist" about this movie. Perhaps we can say it's "charmingly poorly edited" or "charmingly void of grounding", but even this is a stretch. The blaring and "low-fi" techno music, for instance, might be "charming" to me, were it not counterintuitive to the length of the single-shot interview scenes. The interviews themselves are only loosely structured to give an idea of the last years of PKD's life, but even that structure is muddled by overwrought anecdotes and non-sequitors. The human warmth that came across in some of these interviews are really the only valuable thing about this movie, but it seems like the filmmakers were trying their hardest to undermine that quality to turn this into some sort underground geek-punk documentary. Picture a woman relaying to the camera how much she misses Phil, or relaying a touching anecdote about his irreverend and conforting sense of humor,all while irritating fast-paced garage-techno blares in your ear. See the problem?
Rating:
Summary: An uneven but passable documentary
Review: This documentary has received more than its fair share of criticisms, some warranted, some not. It would have been easier - and less risky - to present a 'chronological portrait' of Philip K. Dick and his work, but since such a task would prove especially difficult in an 80-minute documentary, the people behind 'Gospel' wisely chose to emphasize a specific period (mainly from the 70s to his death in 1982) and thematic line (the 1971 break-in; the 2-3-74 visions) and went along with it. As a whole, the various interviewees offer insights of uneven interest (the most notable contributions being arguably made by R. Nelson, D. Scott Apel, J. Kinney and P. Williams), and some anecdotes seem out of place, needlessly extending the film's running time while providing little in the way of intellectual substance. There's no doubt that it could have digged deeper - Dick's work is certainly complex enough to warrant a more meticulous treatment - and the best way to introduce oneself to Dick's world and ideas has always been and still is to read his books. But the fact that the filmmakers made visible efforts to examine the most troubling period of Dick's life, all the while putting him and his work back on the map, should be commended.
Rating:
Summary: An uneven but passable documentary
Review: This documentary has received more than its fair share of criticisms, some warranted, some not. It would have been easier - and less risky - to present a `chronological portrait' of Philip K. Dick and his work, but since such a task would prove especially difficult in an 80-minute documentary, the people behind `Gospel' wisely chose to emphasize a specific period (mainly from the 70s to his death in 1982) and thematic line (the 1971 break-in; the 2-3-74 visions) and went along with it. As a whole, the various interviewees offer insights of uneven interest (the most notable contributions being arguably made by R. Nelson, D. Scott Apel, J. Kinney and P. Williams), and some anecdotes seem out of place, needlessly extending the film's running time while providing little in the way of intellectual substance. There's no doubt that it could have digged deeper - Dick's work is certainly complex enough to warrant a more meticulous treatment - and the best way to introduce oneself to Dick's world and ideas has always been and still is to read his books. But the fact that the filmmakers made visible efforts to examine the most troubling period of Dick's life, all the while putting him and his work back on the map, should be commended.
Rating: 
Summary: Fun Glimpse into World of P. K. Dick
Review: This is a very fun and informative documentary for aficionados of Philip Kindred Dick whose writings directly inspired such science fiction film classics as Total Recall (based on the short story "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale"), Minority Report (based on the story "Minority Report"), and Blade Runner (loosely based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"). Nonetheless, Dick made only a little bit of money near the end of his life time before he died of massive heart attack in his early fifties. He had been married several times, may have been abused as a child, and seemingly experienced benzedrine- and sodium pentothal-potentiated schizophrenia that was also a form of mysticism as well as an inducement to his multiply interpretable science fiction plots. On February 3, 1974 he had an extremely realistic 24-hour hallucination that he raced to explain throughout the remaining years of his life with such questionable concepts as alien contact and the stopping of time. (A Google search should reveal the 52-point Appendix to VALIS which gives an overview of this bizarre cosmology.) Thus, as the filmmakers correctly realized, Dick's life is theoretically of as much epistemological and science fiction interest as the plots he derived from it. This will disappoint you if you want to see a state-of-the art science fiction movie, but it is quite fascinating if you are just looking to get closer to the wellspring of Dick's incredible productivity/creativity. The documentary features interviews with individuals such as Paul Williams, the Rolling Stone journalist who published an interview with him (whose audio tapes have been cleverly used to dub a tasteful cartoon rendition of Dick speaking to us from beyond the grave at his typewriter) and Robert Anton Wilson, author of The Illuminatus Trilogy and a cult figure in his own right (he is a trip). There are also cool extras on the DVD such as a "Dicktionary" of explanations of some of his overarching concepts'e.g., the "zebra"'an alien intelligence that disguises itself among ordinary objects, "kipple"'a kind of spatial counterpart to entropy manifesting (again, as ordinary objects, see his novel Ubik), VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System; considered by some his greatest novel), and the "black iron prison" (a Gnostic concept of Earth and our life here as a kind of spiritual holding tank).
Rating:
Summary: Interesting. But not interesting enough
Review: This video is a shallow and only vaguely interesting study on the life of a fantastic writer. Interviews make up the majority of the content and are mostly people telling their opinions of the man. The beginning of each segment of interview is marked by a stupid animation of a cartoon-PKD typing out little tidbits of trivia. I got the distinct impression that these little cartoons are only in the movie to add length, as each instance of the cartoon is exactly identical. I also though the music was cheesy and annoying. Overall, if the cartoons were taken out. A couple of the more pointless segments were taken out (who cares about the PKD section of the So. Cal. library?!) you would be left with a short, mildly interesting documentary. As it is currently a long, annoying and (in my opinion) intolerable documentary.
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