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Touches You

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Back when Ridley Scott made Blade Runner, it wasn't that well-received by critics, and for many years ended up relegated to being a "cult classic". That seems to be the fate that awaits adaptations of Phillip K Dick's stories into movies that try to keep sight of the Question behind themRadio Free Albemuth, at its core, involves real people like you, me, your neighbor down the road, that kid you knew in grade school. In a time when "gritty realism" in movies is neither gritty nor realistic, it eschews the usual "enhancements" demanded by entertainment to stay true to the original story.Part of that is undoubtedly because as an Indiefilm it was budget constrained, but it is more trying to stay true to the source material without adding in the bells and whistles people demand.RFA isn't a movie you can just watch and come away feeling good about yourself after, but it *is* PKD - given Shea Wigham seems to have been channelling PKD while playing him in the movie, just watch his performance and you'll see what I mean :)Blade Runner is no longer a "cult classic", now it's "visionary" and "prophetic". To some, Radio Free Albemuth already qualifiesRFA is about a group of normal people, flawed warts and all, in an impossible situation, trying to figure out a way to live when the odds are against them. In retelling that story the movie keeps to one precept of PKD's works that most movie adaptations seem to have forgotten:Real life doesn't come with a soundtrack

What lets this film down most is the poor acting. If you can see past this, and you don't get hung up on the idea that special effects are not the be-all and end-all of science fiction movies, you'll see a pretty faithful version of the book. I couldn't say I liked it enormously but it has sadness and political savviness on its side. It left me wondering how much of this was based on PKD's life itself and even made me curious about his real-life death. The brownness and dirtiness of the scenery and sets definitely work well, something lacking in many adaptations of Dick's stories. I do wish it was a little slicker and more commercial but that's probably because I've been spoilt by Hollywood production values. In the end, that's not what science fiction is about. The quality of the acting is a bigger stumbling block for me though.

A worthy project; the first, I think, that actually stems from an understanding of PKD. VALIS - Dick's masterpiece - would probably need to be a high budget production - but your film is a good argument for the producers of Radio Free Albemuth getting the nod for such a project. I have been following Philip K. Dick since the 1950s and was among the earliest to recognize that he rose far above the standard genre science fiction to mainstream surrealist novelist. There have been - since "Bladerunner" loosely based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" - a good number of films and even TV series' based upon PKD's work - mostly his short stories and often missing PKD's point, but Radio Free Albemuth is based upon a complex novel, produced by professionals on a shoestring budget with full comprehension of what PKD was trying to say to the public. These folks should get the big budget necessary to do justice to Dick's masterpieces like VALIS or UBIK. They get the point and show the talent in this film.

I found this to be a pretty amateurish and low-budget effort. OK, so maybe the director didn't have a forty million dollar budget, but still, this had very little artistic merit. There have been films made on the cheap that had artistic vision. Pi for instance. This has next to no artistic vision. The only interesting thing about it were the ideas, and they were courtesy of PKD. The acting was pretty bad all around. The guy who played PKD wasn't too bad, but the others were terrible. Especially Alanis Morrisette. How did she end up in this? Does she know the director or something? OK, so maybe the director is a PKD fan. So am I. That doesn't mean I should bust out my camcorder and record my dog enacting a PKD novel in my backyard. If he can't do justice to the material he should just sell the rights to the other two books that he supposedly has. I'd hate to see them given such shoddy treatment as this.