Dick Johnson Is Dead
— “Dick Johnson Is Dead” was shown at the 2020 True/False Film Fest and, for T/F festival films, I’m giving a general reaction to the viewing experience, followed by the film’s description as it appeared on the festival website.
This is an unexpected blend of fiction and real life, making for a funny journey as father and daughter grapple with the father’s oncoming dementia. It helps that the daughter is the filmmaker and a pretty creative one at that. With humor and poignancy, she manages to get you thinking about the end we’ll all face eventually and the relationships we have. I liked the film a lot and it was recently picked up by Netflix.
Description from the T/F website: “Every day we get older. We can’t stop time and beat death, but we can change the way we react. In the face of losing her father, Dick, to dementia, Kirsten Johnson takes her dad’s death into her own hands. Through a series of hilarious, heart-wrenching fake fatal accidents, action stunts, and macabre special effects, Johnson and her father collaborate in a grand exercise of cinematic shock therapy in order to confront the end together. Blending fiction (Dick is dead) and nonfiction (death itself), this colorful, wildly inventive follow-up to ‘Cameraperson’ (T/F 2016) plumbs the depths of disbelief and the heartache of grief by insisting on the now. A beautiful, deeply self-reflective film full of questions, anger, vulnerability, and laughter, ‘Dick Johnson is Dead’ will change the way you think about mortality, and bring you closer to the people you love.”
This is an unexpected blend of fiction and real life, making for a funny journey as father and daughter grapple with the father’s oncoming dementia. It helps that the daughter is the filmmaker and a pretty creative one at that. With humor and poignancy, she manages to get you thinking about the end we’ll all face eventually and the relationships we have. I liked the film a lot and it was recently picked up by Netflix.
Description from the T/F website: “Every day we get older. We can’t stop time and beat death, but we can change the way we react. In the face of losing her father, Dick, to dementia, Kirsten Johnson takes her dad’s death into her own hands. Through a series of hilarious, heart-wrenching fake fatal accidents, action stunts, and macabre special effects, Johnson and her father collaborate in a grand exercise of cinematic shock therapy in order to confront the end together. Blending fiction (Dick is dead) and nonfiction (death itself), this colorful, wildly inventive follow-up to ‘Cameraperson’ (T/F 2016) plumbs the depths of disbelief and the heartache of grief by insisting on the now. A beautiful, deeply self-reflective film full of questions, anger, vulnerability, and laughter, ‘Dick Johnson is Dead’ will change the way you think about mortality, and bring you closer to the people you love.”
[2020. 89 min. Directed by Kirsten Johnson.]
https://www.indiewire.com/2020/01/dick-johnson-is-dead-review-sundance-netflix-1202205541/
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