Thread by @doctorow

Tonight I got invited to a virtual premiere of #BlissMovie from @PrimeVideo and they asked me to post about the movie afterwards.

It was...good. Weird. Good. Phildickian, ambiguous and very plague-escapist, a good and weird thing for a moment of great anxiety and hope.

1/

Parts of it triggered my, "Sorry, this isn't sf, it's just a cool eyeball kick" complaint, but then again, there was Selma Hayek putting in a genuinely spectacular performance, and Owen Wilson being a lot less goofy (modulo the nose!) than we've come to expect.

2/

Phildickian is not entirely complementary. I love PK Dick, but he didn't always make a hell of a lot of sense. Some of his most haunting stuff was his least coherent, but as David St Hubbins reminded us, "There's such a fine line between clever and stupid."

3/

There were moments in this movie that were well over the line into clever, moments that captured the dream logic of a thousand ambiguous nightmare-fantasies I've slept through and then woken from and not been sure I was awake.

4/

But that "is it, or isn't it?" sense of unreality is a tough sell, because so much of the time, I'm there thinking, "No, it isn't, so none of this matters." It's one thing to live through a dream, it's another thing to make someone else sit through your description of it.

5/

Bliss is a movie that did my head in, and sometimes irritated me, but mostly made me feel weird in a good way.

eof/