Nobel Son

Movies today, are good. I enjoy what they have become, but the art has slowly dripped out of films with a few exceptions. This is definitely one of them. I was very happy with my choice to see this one, having not heard of it I went in not knowing what to expect. I felt that way until the closing credits. It was a fantastic movie of ups and downs and twists and turns, that kept me guessing. The superb acting of the veterans like Alan Rickman, Mary Steenburgen, Danny DeVito, and Bill Pullman. Eliza Dushku continues to excite her audience and prove herself on the screen. Bryan Greenberg and Shawn Hatosy have done great jobs recently and I look forward to seeing them more often. I hope Randall Miller continues his run of good movies after Bottle Shock and Nobel Son, I'm left wanting more!

I had an open mind walking in the theater and knew next to nothing about the film. I was not pleased. The film makers attempt to shock the audience from the onset, however, the real surprise is the subsequent 2 hours of shockingly bad film making. I felt nothing for the actors, not that the script helped. The music was a noisy distraction from the poor editing. I found there to be very few redeeming qualities. Without any connection to the premise, the action, or the comedy I try to rely on a film for entertainment value. I found myself checking the time, waiting for the end, wishing I left earlier. Rent it, if you must.

A strange movie if you ask me. The writing is just plain weird, the plot seems to stretch logic beyond... logic. Most actors in the movie are good, but they seem to be unable to elevate to their true level, what i think is due to a direction problem and the somewhat tortured script. I used to like Danny De Vito (in his very own style) but in this movie...boy.... Same thing for Bill Pullman and the other actors, almost everything seems overplayed and i just couldn't get into the movie for asking myself "what the .... ?" every two minutes. The music, although i'm truly into all sorts of electronic music, is extremely annoying, not necessarily because of its quality (that is a matter of personal taste) but because of its exaggerated presence and inadequacy – i truly had the sensation of watching a movie with my kids playing the radio too loud next door several times during projection. I know Paul Oakenfold for a long time as producer and house music DJ, a very respected figure in the business. Though, It seems he really missed what making music for film is about and you have the sensation the director's promoting his new Album for next Summer in Ibiza, especially throughout the first half hour of the film, which mostly because of this becomes truly unbearable. I usually wouldn't write such thing lightly but in this case i do: not worth the ticket!

Terrible. Awful. Flawed. Haphazard. I can't think of enough adjectives to describe how bad this movie was. What was an interesting concept was chopped up and pieced together and released to theaters. Here is a sure sign of a bad movie; If, at the end, the characters have to summarize everything that just happened, then it's a bad movie. Characters change without reason, other events occur that seem completely unnecessary. SPOILER ALERT----- I think a lot of scenes were written just because they'd make good film. They contributed nothing to the movie, and only added to the confusion. We find out the truth about the kidnapping. If this was the case, then why did we have the original scene in the house, and why did we have the scene involving the thumb later on if the kidnapper had no intention of cutting it off. It makes zero sense. If this kidnapping had been set up from the beginning, then those scenes make no sense to the story. I feel like any given scene was only written to cover a loophole somewhere else. SKIP THIS MOVIE. There are a couple of interesting spots in here, but the movie as a whole just does not hold up at all.

"Nobel Son" is one of the more entertaining movies of the year. It is an intriguing, quirky mix of quick-cutting, edgy direction; an outstanding cast; and some unusually literate text and sophisticated in-jokes for the who-is-doing-it (rather than who-done-it) genre. Randall Miller is the MTV director, Miller and Jody Savin - each with a rather meager resume as a writer - are responsible for the winning script. It's rare and fortuitous these days to walk into a theater to see a movie whose plot you know, and still be engaged and surprised. Such is the case here. With deliberate exaggeration and advance apologies, I'd compare "Nobel Son" to "Sleuth" both for its tit-for-tat, now-you-see-it/now-you-don't continuous cliff-hanger nature, and the sense of amusement and fun even through some rather harrowing action. "Son" is *like* "Sleuth" in the true sense of that grossly abused word: having some of the same characteristics. Only a great English stage actor such as Alan Rickman could make the silly cartoon figure of Eli Michaelson believable - and he does, becoming sort of likable in his unfettered loathsomeness. Michaelson is rotten to the core, antisocial beyond the worst case of Asperger's, plus a miserable human being - and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Mary Steenburgen plays his long-suffering wife, a character with a vaguely delineated past as a storied criminal investigator. Never too far from her is Bill Pullman, a detective, former colleague, current shoulder to lean on. Bryan Greenberg is the son, who - as you must know from all the ads and buzz - is held for ransom, apparently by Shawn Hatosy, a young actor who more than holds his own against the veterans in the cast. Danny Devito and Ted Danson show up, unnecessarily but - in the case of Danson - not irritatingly. Eliza Dushku has a star-turn debut as City Hall (that's the name), a looney poet, painter, and fornicator (their word, not mine). There is something inexplicable about the cinematography: everybody in the cast looks like hell, sans makeup, sans Vaseline-smeared lens, sans everything. Pullman wins the race to Showing All the Pores, pasty-white, as unattractive as possible, but the others - including the women - are not far behind. A new trend? Makeup crew on strike? Who knows? For sure it's distracting, but "Son" is too good to allow this stupid quirk to interfere.

What a terrible, rotten movie. To start with, the character played by Alan Rickman, the Nobel prize winner, was not the least bit believable. It isn't that Rickman played the role badly, but just that the character is not a believable character. If you were to come across this story as a novel, I am sure that you would find the 1st chapter ridiculous and put it down and not finish it. I don't like movies that clearly are put together so as to convince me of one thing and then turn around and change things. This is not the same thing as a clever plot twist. Early during the kidnapping, you naturally ask yourself if the son is in on the kidnapping. You look for evidence of that, but the way that the scenes play out, it is overwhelmingly apparent from his behavior and the behavior of the kidnapper that the son being kidnapped has no knowledge of the kidnapping. Then after doing everything that they can do to make you think this, they reveal that the son is in on it. This simply bad move making. In fact, it is simply awful. I wanted to leave, but having paid for the ticket, I sat through the rest of it, and it only got worse. To pull off the retrieval of the ransom, they do a vehicle switch, which is staged inside a crowded shopping mall, using a couple of Mini vehicles. The first problem with this is that there is no way in hades that a vehicle of that sort could move around like that in a crowded shopping mall without running into all sorts of stuff including people. It is ridiculous. The car that they used for the switch was shipped into the mall in parts and assembled during one night by one person. But the real problem here is how they managed to convert the read car that was on display in the mall, into a car that could be controlled by remote control. They way that they did this, as it really, really was shown in the movie, is that the accomplice set up a distraction and then slapped some sort of gadget onto the underneath of the car when no one was looking. Give me a break. In what fantasy land is it possible to convert a car to a full remote control merely by slapping some sort of gadget to the undercarriage? When this scene was shown, it was not yet revealed what it was about, and only later did it become apparent that this was how he supposedly converted that car to remote control. When I realized this, that was when it was beyond apparent that this movie is just some cheap story that someone threw together in a few hours and then went out and hired some actors and a director and started filming. It is a bad, bad story, with an absurd plot. But as bad as all that was, it got worse by an order of magnitude as soon as the kidnapping was pulled off and the son and the accomplice parted ways. What happens after than is so utterly preposterous that I can't even lower myself to telling you about it. The accomplice, who is the bastard son of the Nobel prize winning father and by all evidence a genius in the first part of the movie, now demonstrates that he is really, really stupid beyond belief. It starts off not the least bit believable, and just becomes increasingly less believable as the story progresses. What else can I say? This is just a very, very bad movie, and I cannot believe that there are so many people who would be even moderately entertained by such a bad story, much less give it the high ratings that it is getting. If you are intelligent and enjoy a clever story, you are going to be insulted by this bad story.

For a movie with such a stellar cast, it's rather disappointing with how this movie turned out. While not expected to be serious Oscar contention, or even serious golden globe contention, it's got a certain sub-par quality to it, that feels like the movie was cobbled together from bits and pieces of other movies rather than standing on it's own. The first act is well done, well acted, well thought-out, but by the time the second act begins, the movie falls downhill, and degrades away into a confusing mess where the viewer is hopelessly lost as the driving force behind the film (The idea of the two sons and the kidnapping) winds up mutated and twisted into-well-a mess. Alan Rickman's grand total of five minutes on camera are wasted, Bill Pullman put more emotion into Casper than he did into this, and the only outstanding performance was Danny Devito as the neurotic neighbor. For such a good premise, and such a good cast, this movie was such a good disappointment.

Greetings again from the darkness. "Bottle Shock" director Randall Miller is back ... only "Nobel Son" was filmed first (you really have to love the Hollywood system). While "Bottle Shock" was a pretty straight forward re-telling of a wine industry break through, this film takes us on a dark ride with blazingly quick turns. It can be taken as a entertaining thriller/who-dunnit to who, or even as a psychological study on egotistical, domineering parents. Much of the "Bottle Shock" crew is back ... Alan Rickman, Bill Pullman and Eliza Dushka. Add Mary Steenburgen, Shawn Hatosy (Outside Providence, The Cooler), Danny Devito and Ted Dansen, and you have an odd, but talented cast to deliver your odd, but entertaining film. Alan Rickman plays the role he seems born to play ... arrogant self-diagnosed genius. His family and co-workers somehow tolerate him despite his blindness to their own talents. This is especially problematic once Rickman becomes a Nobel Prize winner. Without giving anything away, his son, played by Bryan Greenberg (Prime) is kidnapped and held for the $2 million Nobel prize money ... by a guy with ties to Rickman's character. That is the simple part. After that, the script flies through its twists and turns creating quite a mess of fun! Bill Pullman is the detective on the case and he draws from his voice pattern as the odd realtor in "You Kill Me", all while pining for Steenburgen ... who is a brilliant forensic expert in her own right. Danny Devito takes an odd turn as the Reformed OCD gardener who has a couple of memorable scenes. Eliza Duska (the bar owner in Bottle Shock) is quite memorable as the stunningly dark poet who captures Nobel Son's heart the evening before he is nabbed. Coincidence??? What I find most interesting about the script is that it could have focused on any number of story lines. Steenburgen, Rickman and Dushka all have characters that could be developed further. But it really works here to have the division and balance. My only warning here is to be prepared for a Guy Ritchie-type experience. There are times of rapid-fire edits and crazy techno-mod music that will challenge your ability to follow along and keep up. I believe it just adds to the fun in this case.

This really was a hard film to watch. And considering many of these known actors are usually quite good I have to assume that the Director wanted to take a fine group of actors and make them look and act as bad as possible. Or this was made with a lot of favors and now lost friendships. The lighting was horrific. Either that or the cast has aged twenty years recently. Mary, Bill; everyone except Danny looked like they had become old soft and wrinkled over night. The dialogue........who on earth wrote the dialogue. Yeah this in one of those films where you see a cast of mismatched actors who have aged and no one wants to hire them. So they take a film, any film and grab the pay check. EXCEPT that this particular group of actors are NOT that. These are all good actors, these are wonderful actors. And when I see wonderful actors who work in a show like this I have to guess a favor is at hand.

After the first fifteen minutes I though perhaps I had paid seven dollars to see an extended CSI or one of those Vegas casino shows that rely on innumerable zooms and ubercool techno music to convince you that something exciting is happening when it really isn't. The only movie with a mildly complex plot to use these techniques to its advantage was "Confidence" and even then it risked being corny at times. The acting really wasn't bad, rightly so with such a cast, but many times I couldn't even make out the substance of the performance because house-beats were blaring in my ears. I was initially suspicious of a film that claimed to be a comedy and a thriller and a drama. Now, if your critical film viewing level peaks somewhere around The Fast and the Furious, then read no more. Clumsy plot twists, inappropriate editing and music selection won't phase your iron-trap of a mind. I am by nature a humble and optimistic movie-viewer, but at some point (involving a mall and a remote controlled vehicle) I experienced a mental collapse due to cognitive dissonance. The lingering themes of cannibalism, familial dysfunction, dark sides of human nature, etc were washed away by a wave of unbelievable ( as in un- believable) action sequences. I began to break out in a nervous sweat and wondered if I hadn't wandered into another theater in my delusional state. Basically, I feel as if this film was written by several different people who never once contacted each other. There are some decent ideas in all three or four of the genres which it sought to present. But apparently no single one human being ever read the script before production. If you do see it for yourself, hopefully you can figure out why Ted Dansen and Danny DeVito were in it. I'm fairly confident their performances had no impact whatsoever on the film.