LA-Story.com

The film Nobel Son hits DVD and why I never heard of this film or saw a trailer in theater is beyond me. This is a great film you should see — and buy on DVD — because of the astonishingly great performances from the entire cast and the twisted plot that starts out as a funny mid-life crisis flick and keeps morphing into other plots and stories as it keeps going.

Nobel Son starts off featuring Barkley Michaelson, a 20-something gin a life rut struggling to finish his Ph.D thesis. Forever i n the shadow of his highly-accomplished father, Eli Michaelson, the extremely strained and distant relationship between father and son is a source of pain for the mother/wife, Mary Steenburgen who tries to bridge the gap between them while looking the other way at the various affairs that Michaelson has with various students.

Alan Rickman and Ted Danson

Upon winning the Nobel prize in chemistry, the Michaelson’s fly off to the awards ceremony minus Barkley who has been kidnapped. His parents get a ransom call overseas and Michaelson — in a very strange move- refuses to pay because he thinks it’s Barkley creating a ruse for missing the flight to honor his father— except the kidnapping is the “real deal” and the entire movie suddenly changes its plot-line. The ransom is a mere $2000 — the amount of the Nobel Prize award and the kidnapper attempts to cut off Barkley’s thumb (as shown in previous scenes by this serial killer who cuts off his victims’ thumbs before killing them), the viewer and Barkley are quite worried that suddenly life has become very precious- -and he’s willing to do “anything” to stay alive!

Trailer

Telling you anymore about this DVD would be a spoiler for sure and it’s definitely a fun, funny, quirky, interesting and tautly played film. There are lots of smaller parts played deftly by various actors including Ted Danson, Bill Pullman, Danny DeVito and Eliza Duskhu.