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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: 20th Century Fox
Salesrank: 18237
Released: June 9, 2009 |
| Our Price: $4.03 |
| Used Price: $2.19 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Genre: Comedy
Rating: R
Release Date: 9-JUN-2009
Media Type: DVD
Description of Nobel Son:
Flashy visuals, an incessant techno soundtrack, and a plot full of twists that depend on everything going just a certain way…if this is your idea of a good time, Nobel Son will prove a useful diversion. For the rest of us, this comedy-thriller wears out its welcome fairly early on, despite the glorious promise of a deliciously wicked Alan Rickman performance. In the kind of role perfected by George Sanders once upon a time, Rickman plays a womanizing egotist whose self-regard is swelled to the breaking point when he wins the Nobel Prize in chemistry. But when he and his wife (Mary Steenburgen) jet to Sweden to claim the award, their son (Bryan Greenberg) is kidnapped by a brute (Shawn Hatosy) claiming to be the scientist's illegitimate offspring, with a hefty grudge against Dad. If Rickman weren't off screen for so much of this keep-'em-guessing storyline, the movie might be more bearable, and it would help if sexpot poet Eliza Dushku had more face time too. But the sound and fury whipped up by director Randall Miller (Bottle Shock) looks suspiciously like an attempt to approximate what the kids supposedly want to see these days, so the movie comes across as insincere as well as unpleasant. If you're going to spend this much screen time on a sequence detailing the sawing off of someone's thumb, you really ought to mean it. --Robert Horton
Nobel Son Reviews:
a fun thriller/drama/comedy/romance 
2009-10-13 - A really well-done, twisted mystery-thriller-comedy, where the story is so good that you want to watch the film more than once. Having Alan Rickman as the grumpy old man, who gets what he has coming to him, is a great casting decision. Eliza Dushku is also very good in her role.
Waste of Time 
2009-06-12 -
I agree with Robert Horton's review under the amazon.com Editorial Review section. Save your money and find another film to sit through.
Save Yourself the Ear Ache 
2009-06-07 - "Nobel Son" (2008), a comedic dramatic crime thriller, was written, produced, directed and edited by Randall Miller, who might also have done the on-site catering, for all I know. The film does boast a number of stars, and does give some older ones jobs.
Brit Alan Rickman, (the Harry Potter movies, Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street) evidently a very valuable man on a film site, plays the lead as Eli Michaelson, a chemistry professor at a California university who's just, for reasons of getting the plot going, we must assume, been awarded a Nobel Prize. Rickman turns in one of his patented performances here, creating a truly dislikable character, egotistical, skirt-chasing, dishonest, nasty, and sarcastic. Mary Steenburgen (Nixon - A Presidency Revealed, The Grass Harp) plays Sarah, his long-suffering psychotherapist wife. Her real-life husband Ted Danson ( Becker - The First Season,Cheers - The Complete First Season ) has a cameo as Harvey Parrish, a fellow academic of Eli's. Bryan Greenberg (Bride Wars) plays Eli's eminently forgettable son Barkley, laboring over his master's thesis. Danny De Vito (The Big Kahuna,L.A. Confidential) plays George Gastner, an obsessive-compulsive whom Sarah treats. The lovely Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse: Season One) plays son Barkley's love interest, young female poetess City Hall, a thankless part that forgets no stereotype of what a young poetess might be. Shawn Hatosy (The Cooler) plays Thaddeus James, a nutter, who, wouldn't you know it, kidnaps Eli's son Barkley for a ransom of $2 million, exactly the amount of the Nobel Award, just as Eli and Sarah are taking off for Scandinavia, and the biggest night of their lives. How thoughtless, inconsiderate, and inconvenient of him, indeed. Bill Pullman ("Lake Placid") will play Detective Max Mariner; Ernie Hudson ("Ghostbusters") will play Sgt. Bill Canega, cops who are brought in to search for Barkley.
The presence of both Steenburgen and Danson in the film leaves me wondering if they produced it for themselves and their friends. Nevertheless, the acting's reasonably good. I would have been happy to see more of the comely Dushku, more face time, that is, not more skin: there's plenty of that on view. The movie plays as if writer/director Miller made lists of various old plot devices, and wrote his script, one from Column A, one from Column B. The soundtrack, of already dated techno, could deafen the dead. Save yourself the ear ache.
Plot and soundtrack ... 
2009-04-27 - are the among the best I have seen in a while ..
love the mini cooper action in the mall ..
If you liked Italian Job, you'll like this one too ..
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
2008-12-16 - Have you ever randomly picked a vacation destination by spinning a globe with your eyes closed? The plot of "Nobel Son" works in much the same way; it spins and spins its tangled web and can end up here or there or anywhere. It's all at once a brutal dark comedy and an engrossing mystery, and it teases both the characters and the audience along with a series of deceptions and revelations and twists. This is no small task considering the demented nature of the main character's PhD thesis, which somehow forms a connection between cannibalism and a Game Boy system; it acts as a sort of thematic umbrella, under which lies a twisted story of human nature, specifically in matters of making sure certain people get what they deserve. Yes, I'm describing a very broad concept, and I admit that it doesn't do an adequate job explaining what this movie is about. But to be perfectly honest, I don't think I can give you an in-depth plot synopsis, partly because the details are difficult to sort out, but mostly because a description might spoil a number of pivotal moments.
I can, however, give you a vague idea. Let's begin with Eli Michaelson (Alan Rickman), who may in fact be one of the meanest, most unlikable characters of any film this decade. He's a Chemistry teacher with an ego that sprawls out even farther than the Periodic Table of Elements. He thinks he's better than his colleagues. He isn't kind to his wife, a forensic psychologist named Sarah (Mary Steenburgen); truth be told, he cheats on her at every possible opportunity. He certainly can't cut his son a break, an eager doctorate student named Barkley (Bryan Greenberg).
One day, Eli learns that he's won the Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, Barkley is kidnapped on the day of his father's flight to Sweden. Naturally, his father doesn't believe that he's been kidnapped when the kidnapper, an insane car junkie named Thaddeus James (Shawn Hatosy), allows him to speak on the phone. But as Eli and Sarah are escorted back to their hotel after the ceremony, they open a package and discover a severed human thumb. That's when Thaddeus names his terms: $2 million in exchange for Barkley's life.
To describe any more of the plot would be pointless. Needless to say, nothing is what it seems, and just about everyone has something to hide. Take Sarah, whose training allows her to deconstruct things so thoroughly that it's virtually impossible to get anything past her. She remains mostly passive about her husband's appalling behavior throughout most of the film, although there's a sense that she knows him better than he knows himself. There's a quiet but interesting moment between her and Max Mariner (Bill Pullman), the detective assigned to Barkley's case; she hopes that the severed thumb belongs to her son, because if it doesn't, that means the kidnapper is dangerously methodical.
As for Mariner, he seems to know that something about Barkley's situation isn't quite right. He goes from place to place, interviewing everyone who might know something. One of these people is the next-door neighbor, Gastner (Danny DeVito), a recovering obsessive-compulsive. Another person is City Hall (Eliza Dushku), who Barkley met at a poetry reading at the local bookstore. I honestly don't know what to make of her, and her name is certainly of no help. Then again, given the nature of the plot, one may not have to understand her. One look at her apartment is enough to unsettle even the darkest of minds. She's an artist with a lot of baggage, all of which carries over into her work. Paintings cover a lot of wall space, and they're all nothing more than muddy smears of color.
And then there's Thaddeus. Why on earth would he kidnap the son of a Nobel Prize winner? All I can say is that he has his reasons. When we first meet him, everything is clear-cut in his mind; he has a plan, and he intends to follow it to a tee. But then he kidnaps Barkley, and almost immediately, nothing is clear-cut anymore. Plans change. New lies are concocted. Alliances are formed and then broken. As is the case with City Hall, trying to understand Thaddeus is most likely unnecessary. Even though he explains himself, what motivates him is not as important as what he does.
I'm now realizing that this review has been annoyingly vague. But unless you want me to spoil the whole thing, I don't have much of a choice. Not that it matters a great deal; the mystery in this film is so bizarre and meandering that it's really nothing more than a distortion of someone's perception. Part of the fun was not knowing which direction the plot would go in, which is to say that I was continuously surprised all throughout. "Nobel Son" is an odd but engaging film that indirectly analyzes human behavior and the consequences it can bring. It's also a wonderful vehicle for Alan Rickman, who can play nasty like few actors I've seen in a long time. What a deplorable man his character is, so unfeeling, so arrogant, so greedy. There's never a moment when you don't wish that something horrible would happen to him. He actually makes Ebenezer Scrooge seem downright pleasant. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he never won the Nobel Prize.
