Though some seriously incredible movie adaptations have been made from his novels, Philip K. Dick didn't live long enough to see any of them be released. Dying at the age of 53 in March of 1982, he passed away only a months before the release of the classic Blade Runner. Movies like Total Recall and Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly have been released since, but now Hollywood seems to be really high on Dick's work. The Adjustment Bureau is two weeks away from release, the remake of Total Recall gets going in a few months and now Michel Gondry wants to adapt one of Dick's greatest novels.
Allocine (vaiThe Playlist) is reporting that Gondry has set his sights on making Ubik, the Philip K. Dick novel that landed him on Time Magazine's list of the top 100 modern English-language novels. The story centers on a character named Joe Chip who works for a company that blocks telepathic spying. During a mission on the Moon, things go terribly wrong and while Chip survives, reality starts to slip and only Ubik, a strange substance sold in spray cans, helps put everything back together.
How could anyone not be thrilled by this news? Just reading that plot description should have triggered memories of how Gondry screwed with reality in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The only problem is that Gondry has plenty of other projects on his plate, including a Noam Chomsky documentary and a project called The We and I. As long as it gets here eventually, however, I think we can be happy.
