{"id":877,"date":"2011-03-03T12:21:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-03T20:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/03\/philip-k-dick-at-the-movies.html"},"modified":"2011-03-03T12:21:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-03T20:21:00","slug":"philip-k-dick-at-the-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/03\/philip-k-dick-at-the-movies.html","title":{"rendered":"Philip K. Dick at the Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow a new film based on a Philip K. Dick story, <\/span>The Adjustment Bureau<\/i><\/span>, opens. I\u2019ve not yet seen the Matt Damon\/Emily Blunt film yet, but the PKD fans I know are not impressed with it and don\u2019t think it\u2019s true to the author\u2019s vision and thinks it’s been skewed too much in a conventional-romantic direction. (Here<\/a> is a mostly approving review by the NYT’s Manohla Dargis.)<\/span><\/p>\n


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The film is based on a 1954 Dick short story, \u201cAdjustment Team,\u201d which is pretty decent for early PKD has more cinema-ready action than many; within a few pages much of the protagonist’s world has crumbled to ash and he’s chased with menacing minders — “men in white robes” — of the kind the author specialized in. Jonathan Lethem collects the piece in the 2002 Selected Stories<\/i> and writes that in this story “we meet the Dick of the great sixties novels, his characters defined by how they endure more than by any triumph over circumstances<\/span>.” (I’m gonna take my guess as to whether it’s the crashing action or the stolid endurance that plays a bigger role in this film version.)<\/span><\/div>\n

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<\/a>Director George Nolfi seems to have his heart in the right place.\u00a0 \u201cDick was really interested in the line between reality and some mental construct that could be illusion or could be another level of existence,\u201d Nolfi told Geoff Boucher of Hero Complex<\/a>. \u201cI really wanted to take that and turn it on its head and ask, \u2018What happens if you see behind the curtain and it\u2019s unequivocally clear that is the truth?\u2019 What you\u2019ve seen before is only a tiny part of reality, how do you deal with that?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Here<\/span><\/a> is Geoff’s whole piece.<\/span><\/div>\n
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I\u2019m more excited about the announcement that Ubik<\/i> \u2013 tight, funny, philosophical and perhaps Dick\u2019s finest novel despite being a bit of a mess at the end \u2013 will be directed by Michel Gondry, whose Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind<\/i> is one of several fine movies that bears the author\u2019s stamp despite not being based directly on his work. Though Gondry has stumbled lately, he\u2019s an imaginative director with a gift for the startling image, and he loves ideas. <\/p>\n

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Dick scholar David Gill, on Total Dick-Head blog, reports himself \u201cambivalent\u201d about the Gondry choice. His post <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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And let\u2019s not forget Radio Free Albemuth<\/a><\/i>, a no-budgert indie based on an odd and sort-of-autobiographical novel with a quasi-Nixonian conspiracy: The film is not perfect, but it captures the tone of Dick\u2019s novels as well as any adaptation I\u2019ve seen, and the PKD community has lined up behind it. Its trailer is <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>. (The film’s site reminds me that the author died 29 years ago yesterday, in Orange County.)<\/span>

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And brief news<\/a> today, Friday, that Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/i> may inspire another movie that could be a sequel or prequel to Blade Runner<\/i>.<\/span><\/div>\n

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And HERE<\/a> a link to all of my posts on PKD.<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow a new film based on a Philip K. Dick story, The Adjustment Bureau, opens. I\u2019ve not yet seen the Matt Damon\/Emily Blunt film yet, but the PKD fans I know are not impressed with it and don\u2019t think it\u2019s true to the author\u2019s vision and thinks it’s been skewed too much in a conventional-romantic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[76,186,137,29],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-877","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-film","7":"category-philip-k-dick","8":"category-science-fiction","9":"category-west-coast","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}