A single mother raises a child prodigy on her own, struggling to give him every opportunity he needs to express his gift.A single mother raises a child prodigy on her own, struggling to give him every opportunity he needs to express his gift.A single mother raises a child prodigy on her own, struggling to give him every opportunity he needs to express his gift.
- Awards
- 2 wins & 1 nomination
- Garth
- (as David Pierce)
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaJodie Foster's directorial film debut.
- GoofsWhen asked the question of what factors the number 3,067 has, Damon replies that the number has no factors because it is prime. That is incorrect. Every prime number has two factors: 1 and the number itself. Yet the moderator accepts his answer of "no factors" without even asking for clarification.
- Quotes
[last lines]
Fred Tate: I once got this fortune cookie that said, "only when all things around you are different will you truly belong". Well, we're all different that's for sure. I see Jane everyday at the institute, and once in while Dede let's her take us out to a fancy restaurant. Sometimes we even have fun. After a while I was the most famous kid at Jane's school. But then a year later, a 6 year old boy named Willie Yamaguchi got into law school, and suddenly I wasn't such a big deal anymore. But I don't care, because I was happy.
- SoundtracksI Get A Kick Out Of You
Words and music by Cole Porter
Performed by Ella Fitzgerald
Courtesy of Polygram Special Products
A Division of Polygram Group Distribution, Inc.
To be fair, the movie looks little more than a better-than-average TV movie, but is elevated by its director's star turn in front of the cameras, plus some neat little (that word again!) directorial flourishes, like a slow cutaway into the distance of Foster's workaday waitress Dee Tate's mother/son dance with young son Fred and at other points interesting suffusions of light and animation to perhaps demonstrate the surging thought process of the precocious infant.
The narrative gets a little skewered as Fred is adopted by a wealthy philanthropist female, childless naturally, whose feelings quickly move from professorial to matrimonial and a too obvious conflict with Foster's more down-home mother love. Some of the situations are a little too pat also, for instance the way that Fred cleaves to older boys, one a maths prodigy himself, the other a piano-playing college boy (played by a young Harry Connick Junior), the lad obviously groping emotionally for a male bonding relationship with his natural father nowhere around.
Freak occurrences too like Connick's initial encounter with Fred (symbolically dropping the whole world on his shoulders!) and a side-lined Foster's rescue of a drowning child just as Fred's making an appearance at the professor's side on national TV also jar credulity a little and of course sentimentality rears its largely unwelcome head before the happy ending, but I'm perhaps being too severe on what is when all is said and done, a warm, family entertainment on an off-beat subject.
- Lejink
- Jun 12, 2010
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Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Languages
- Also known as
- Mentes que brillan
- Filming locations
- Upham Hall Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA(The scene where Fred gets hit in the head with the globe was shot in front of Upham Hall)
- Production company
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Budget
- $10,000,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $25,010,896
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $230,106
- Oct 14, 1991
- Gross worldwide
- $25,010,896
- Runtime1 hour 39 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 1.85 : 1