By John Hertz: This evidence of the Man in the High Castle movie was the back of my rail-ticket-to-Westercon envelope and, a picture being worth a thousand words, might be of general interest.
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I’m getting ready for it! My wife is half-way through the Books on Tape version of it, and I think I’m getting her interested in it 🙂
Forgive the pedantry, but Man in the High Castle is a television series on Amazon Instant Video rather than a movie.
Jim Henley: You are forgiven.
Though tell me this — when you go to a movie house and what they project on the screen comes from a digital recording, do you register a complaint there too?
The first episode is an hour long, so no, I wouldn’t call it a movie; maybe a short movie.
ETA: And it seems pretty well done.
I watched the pilot of The Man in the High Castle during Amazon’s “Pilot Season” period. It was well made but cold as ice and rather slow. The actors are fairly generic.
Didn’t think the novel would make for a good tv series, given that what really kicks the novel into higher gear is how it ends. I figured the tv series would just go for the alternate history angle and drop the metatext, but it seems to have taken it in stride. Hopefully it leads to interesting storylines.
Don’t know if it’s the age I am, but I thought that pilot was terrifying – and very well made. The part where our truck driver breaks down and is helped by a local cop who tells him that the ash falling around them is from the local hospital where they are burning the disabled and infirm ….. shudder.
Recently read the two chapters that Dick wrote for the sequel — sure wish he’d finished it.
Paul
Yep! Shudder is definitely the right word. It’s just as well that there are lots and lots of tunnels under the Barbican, come the apocalypse…
@Mike: I do not! But if they project an episode of a television show and call it a movie…
Contrary to P. S. Simon above, I’m glad that Dick abandoned the High Castle sequel idea. His novels have remained rereadable to me precisely because they’re standalone.
I presume the series they’re shooting now will continue to revisit NYC, as seen in the pilot. This is a big untapped area; the novel includes no scenes set within the Nazi-occupied east.
(The other aspect of the pilot worth mentioning here is that the underground novel-within-a-novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is now presented as a silent film – one that resonates strongly with the A and B documentaries in Dick’s The Penultimate Truth. I wonder whether other elements from unrelated Dick stories will find their way into the series.)
That first episode has finally made me glad I got Amazon’s video service with my Prime account.
And yes – Shudder indeed.