sketch of first impressions from the RFA movie

Here's a collection of short posts I made after driving up to Reno to see the Radio Free Albemuth movie. A longer writeup of my trip and proper review should be coming soon, VALIS willing.

The Radio Free Albemuth movie is the Philip K. Dick movie we've been waiting for. The first truly faithful PKD adaptation: mind blowing fun.

Radio Free Albemuth deserves credit almost unique among PKD movies for treating the material straight, in its original spirit, not twisting.

Shea Whigham as Philip K. Dick was a casting coup. He nails the man's deadpan humor with his laconic delivery but without losing the human.

The #RFA film is the first #PKD treatment to depict his "supernatural" experiences in a serious and sensitive fashion. No cheap laughs ever.

RFA is the story of the friendship between a SF writer + a man whose mystical visions actually improve his life--until he takes on dystopia!

Radio Free Albemuth displays remarkable courage in treating PKD straight, but also great sensitivity in rendering his visionary experiences.

RFA has benefit of being SF movie not pkd biopic, but has autobiographical elements--usually too easy a target, here they're treated justly.

Radio Free Albemuth can be compared to the Bill Pullman PKD movie, which has a more mean-spirited method of making the experiences laughable

Jonathan Scarfe did a wonderful job as Nicholas Brady. radiofreealbemuth.com/blog/?page_id=… Successfully captured the beatific happy look+confidence of 3-74

Radio Free Albemuth didn't feel like an independent film. The acting+ production values were nothing short of a miracle, given their limits.

My mind was further blown when John Simon + Elizabeth Karr hung around after the screening+told us how they pulled off the casting+shooting.

Katheryn Winnick surprised me with her portrayal of Rachel in the #RFA movie. She brilliantly captured the loving harshness of a PKDian wife

Hannah Hall was terrifying as the honeytrap "teen" police state agent. Her seduction scene is the most sexy/paranoid PKD love scene on film.

When I crashed the SF convention(RFA played after the Hugos)I was carrying "the novels of PKD" to have something to kill time, ran into KSR!

Ended up having a really fun chat with Greg Bear and Stan Robinson about PKD, graphomania, question of whether he was touched by God, +film.

Boehme illustrations

PKD as Critic quote from Pamela Jackson's dissertation

"...Philip K. Dick should be read as a sort of critic himself; one dwelling in the same territory as many contemporary cultural theorists, approaching via his own particular kind of angst and hyperbole the same huge topics that have preoccupied so many others: authorship, interpretation, language, power." (p. 8)

Thanks to Frank Bertrand for the quote.

blurb on the forthcoming Exegesis volume

Dick, Philip K. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Houghton Harcourt. Nov. 2011. 1056p. ISBN 9780547549255. $49; eISBN 9780547549279. MEMOIR/LITERATURE
The author of 36 sf novels and 121 short stories, the much-revered Dick turned metaphysical as he grew older, spending the last eight years of his life trying to understand what he called “2-3-74”—an experience of the universe transformed into information. He devoted thousands of pages of notes, journal entries, and sketches to this effort, packing some of his thoughts into his final “VALIS” trilogy. Pamela Jackson, who devoted her dissertation to “2-3-74,” and novelist Jonathan Lethem have edited Dick’s vast material to create this final Exegesis. And if you really want to understand what I just attempted to say, you need to read the book. A blockbuster for all fans of speculative literature.

pasted from http://blog.libraryjournal.com/prepubalert/2011/05/16/nonfiction-28/