Product Description

Rick is the sort of guy you probably once really liked: a devoted husband and a loving father, he lives in a lavish Park Avenue apartment paid for by a high powered corporate job. He has a sharp sense of humor and enjoys a cold, well-prepared martini but the world's gone wrong for Rick. His wife is dead. His teenage daughter Eve is distant as she approaches womanhood. His job gets more and more degrading with each passing day. His young boss Duke is an aggressive punk who forces Rick literally to his knees and spends his time talking dirty in Internet chat rooms, while Rick has to do the dirty work. And it seems you can't even have a martini in this town without getting a curse from an enemy or sinister proposal from an old friend. No wonder his sense of humor is getting a little nasty.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #109011 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-11-09
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 93 minutes

Amazon.com
Rick is a rare feature that makes intelligent and exciting use of audience bewilderment. From its opening scenes, this quirky update of Verdi's Rigoletto thrusts viewers into a bizarre corporate culture in which mean-spiritedness, adolescent high jinks, and general dimwittedness are the norm, but there is no explanation as to why. Yet it's impossible to turn away from the madness and decadence of scenes in which Bill Pullman's middle-aged executive, Rick, engages in monstrous behavior toward subordinates or exchanges in fraternal obscenities with his young, clueless boss, Duke (Aaron Stanford), who is routinely enjoying anonymous, online sex with Rick's daughter, Eve (Agnes Bruckner). Screenwriter Daniel Handler, better known to the world as author Lemony Snicket, and director Curtiss Clayton slowly introduce enough background to unlock the central tragedy in this tale, and lead everyone to a shared, startling destiny. Cinematographer Lisa Rinzler (Pollock) sets everything against a fantastic cityscape and voyeuristic hell. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

A sharp jab at corporate culture...
Here's an ultra-clever piece of work that deserves more than its current obscure status. Based on Rigoletto, this whipsnap of a movie casts Bill Pullman as the title character with the improbable last name of O'Lette (just to make sure you don't miss the reference), a nasty SOB with a megabucks Wall Street job who treats people like slime and at the same time has to grovel to a boss 20 years his junior. The boss, Duke (beginning to get the picture here?) is an immature rich kid jerk who lusts after Rick's daughter, and is married to a dimbulb woman almost as dense as he is.

Enter Buck, with whom Rick went to business school, and who has a business that speciailizes in reducing the earth's population--one person at a time. He promises to wipe out whomever Rick chooses for a mere 10 grand. Rick has a pretty good idea of who that would be. And of course, this being an opera-based neo-noir tale, things don't exactly go according to plan. Reminiscent of Fargo and Shock to the System--in fact, you could say this is a pretty nifty fusion of those two edgy films--Rick's smarts (that is, the film's intelligence, not the main character's) shines through in almost every scene. A few small missteps here and there, but nothing serious, this is another film that has a lot of fun slapping you in the face and watching your reaction.

Hurts so good. Nice piece of work from writer Dan Handler who wrote the Lemony Snicket thing; looks like he specializes in nasty characters who get their come-uppance and then some. I especially like the back and forth of the one-syllable names at the bar--"Rick", "Mick", "Buck", "Jack", "Duke"--very snappy, as though the F word is being hurtled from one guy to another (yeah, it's a guy thing) ceaselessly.

Definitely recommended. If you like Shock to the System, Fargo, Office Killer, and probably one or two other black comedies I can't think of the names of right now, you'll dig this one.

Snappy.

Oh, Sandra Oh! A new Bill Pullman
Sandra Oh has IT. The girl can do comedy and drama. As a woman degraded, she casts a witch's curse that propels this pop Rigoletto in which the soundtrack is a sensuous mix of Christmas carols that underscore the psychological drama directly as well as ironically. (I'm buying the soundtrack next!)The script with it revealing cliches of office dialog and 4-letter names that are used like 4-letter words is music to my literary ears. Too many producers forget that a film begins with writing. The last, but not least revelation, was Bill Pullman's self-lacerating performance that recalls the conflicted icon Jack Lemmon in "The Apartment." Having never really cared for Pullman before, I hesitated when I saw the billing. But the guy made a believer out of me with his muttering performance depicting a man who was once good, and who was whittled away by urban violence and corporate hypocrisy. Aaron Stanford as Duke, the Bigboss, gives the kind of performance that gets Supporting Actor nominations. His character is an archetype of our times, because he chatters on in halls and on line all the while he is gorgeously clueless regarding his superficiality, his wife, and his employees. For an interesting double feature, watch this film with "Rodger Dodger." Or, pair this serious film with another Christmas-driven movie for grown-ups, the hilarious comedy "The Ref."

If this isn't a cult classic, it darn well should be
Talk about your series of unfortunate events! Scriptwriter Daniel Handler (the man behind Lemony Snicket) delivers up a thoroughly adult tale of power, greed, lust, innocence lost, and seemingly foreordained tragedy in Rick. The movie may be patterned on Verdi's opera Rigoletto, yet the presentation of this story is uniquely memorable; it's a brilliant, intelligent, quirky dark comedy/morality tale that really should be a cult classic. Bill Pullman has finally made a believer out of me; I don't know why I have found it somewhat difficult to like him in the past, but he's really zoomed up my personal rankings of actors with his effort here. He may well be the only actor that could have pulled this role off to the maximum effect - it's a nuanced, quirky performance that samples just about all of the spectrums of modern life. When we first meet Rick, he's a jerk - pure and simple. Some viewers seemingly never got over that, but for me, this character quickly developed into a likeable, albeit unfortunate, human being filled with regrets yet seemingly trapped in a persona that he truly abhors in his heart. His love for his late wife emerges through his interaction with his somewhat wayward daughter Eve (Agnes Bruckner - and let me just say that the mental image I associate with the name Agnes has now been put completely on its head), and his contempt for his boss and co-workers - and thereby himself - becomes increasingly obvious.

Rick's boss Duke (Aaron Stanford), aka BigBoss, is a complete jerk and a pervert. When he and Rick are together, it's all fun and games, a contest to see who can step on more of the little people around them. The vindictiveness we see in Rick's character is fuelled by his secret hatred of Duke, who is young enough to be his son. In the tradition of reaping what you sow, Rick is inflicted with a "Chinese curse" by a young lady (Sandra Oh) whom he humiliated in an interview before also getting her fired from her current job. Before he can even laugh that threat off, a former college buddy shows up out of nowhere offering to help Rick get to the top. When the BigBoss is a kid, there's really only one surefire method of getting him out of the way of your professional development. Rick wants no part of such nonsense, but his reasoning changes as his life proceeds to come apart at the seams. In a real sense, all he has in his life is his daughter Eve, and she's something of a handful. Things develop in such a way that, for personal as well as business reasons, Rick wants Duke to disappear.

It's true that the ending doesn't exactly jump out at you and surprise you, but a good movie is not defined by a good, surprising conclusion - it's how you get to that conclusion, and Rick (the film) forges an unforgettable path from here to there. It's a dark comedy that morphs into a tragedy, and I found it incredibly compelling from beginning to end - and, as far as I'm concerned - it's brilliantly done. A lot of the humor is quick and subtle, but it all contributes to a virtual pillaging of business as usual in the modern world. Odd but effective camera angles and a disquieting soundtrack made up of darkly modified Christmas tunes effects a surreal atmosphere for the drama that unfolds, marking Rick as a definite modern morality play. The writing is sharp, incisive, biting, and wonderfully interconnected, with Handler tying ever plot element together in a way few writers can match. This is a brilliant motion picture that does not deserve its current state of obscurity.