Starring: Alan Rickman, Bryan Greenberg, Shawn Hatosy, Mary Steenburgen, Bill Pullman Directed By: Randall Miller Average Rating: Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: DVD Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC Number of Items: 1 Region Code: 1 Release Date: June 09, 2009 Running Time: 110 minutes Studio: 20th Century Fox Theatrical Release Date: 2007
Genre: Comedy Rating: R Release Date: 9-JUN-2009 Media Type: DVD
Amazon.com: 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
Very Dark Humor ^ This was a very dark humored film. It is definitely for adults only. There were violent and graphic scenes also sexual scenes. This film was a little too dark (in parts) for me but I'm sure others would enjoy it thoroughly. Alan Rickman must have had fun doing this role. The ending was worth waiting it.
Tries a bit too hard to be cool but has some style ^ Grad student Barkley Michaelson (Bryan Greenberg) is getting his PhD in cannibalism - not for actually eating his fellow man, mind you, but for studying those who do. This choice of topic doesn't sit very well with his dad, a hateful, arrogant college professor who's just been awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry and who wants his son to carry on his legacy after he`s gone. Unfortunately, as Professor Eli Michaelson is over in Stockholm gracelessly accepting his award, Barkley is back home in Pasadena being held for ransom by a crazed kidnapper. This is the setup for "Nobel Son," an Oedipal drama done in the form of a smart-alecky, wisecracking pitch dark comedy. Acting stalwarts Mary Steenburgen, Shawn Hatosy, Bill Pullman, Danny DeVito and Ted Danson round out the cast.
If there's one thing a filmmaker can't fake, it's "coolness" - yet that's the one thing writer/director Randall Miller keeps working so hard to achieve in "Nobel Son," a movie that too often comes across as a poor-man's version of Quentin Tarentino. Yet, despite that derivativeness, the movie's frenetic style - a mixture of razzle-dazzle camera and editing techniques, snarky black humor, and a pounding rock soundtrack - reveals that Miller has some real potential as a filmmaker. And a series of nifty plot twists in the final third go a long way towards mitigating any misgivings one may have harbored about the movie earlier on.
a fun thriller/drama/comedy/romance ^ 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.
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 ^ "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.
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