Open Water, Widescreen

I think we're going to need a... boat.You don?t have to be an experienced scuba diver to know that the idea of being left behind by the tour boat is a scary thought. Plunk yourself in the middle of the ocean, take out the notion of the boat coming back for you, and you should be primed and ready for a terrifying experience. The viewer can?t help but relate to the stranded protagonists, but it kicks up a notch when the dilemma brings out a festering marital strife as dorsal fins appear and disappear. Ever have an argument about getting the pair of you lost? Multiply that by a thousand and you?re getting warm.

Executed with effective camerawork and a sea-level sense of dread and anxiety, ?Open Water? was often compared to ?The Blair Witch Project? for its indie success and lo-fi sensibility to filmmaking. No disrespect to ?Blair? intended, but this ain?t some walk in the park. These sharks are real, and there was far more on the line here. .... >> read the full review

Rick
Rating: Good

We must have waffles forthwith!In their brief interview segments (divided into five mini-featurettes), director/editor Curtiss Clayton and writer Daniel Handler make no bones about admitting "Rick" is based on Verdi Opera "Rigoletto," where a court jester's efforts to hide his beautiful daughter from the King are a lost cause. Transposed to modern times, the jester's a whipped, aging executive, forced to accept regular abuse from his twentysomething "Big Boss" while shielding his daughter from the boss' lecherous hands. A murder pact promises to correct things, until some awful twists provide for some great tension.

"Rick" has a straightforward narrative, but the included theatrical trailer reveals the distributor's apprehension in selling such a hard-toned film; the mix of unrelated images and text captions, set to a Christmas jingle, may have been designed to pique the audience's curiosity, but with no indication of the film's basic plot, the first campaign was a bit of a marketing blunder. ...