Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
This was one wacked-out script, and it sounds like the film has an amazing cast... and one wacked-out script.
Here’s the Scrubbing Bubble with our first peek:
Hey Harry,
The Scrubbing Bubble here with a first look at James Mangold's Identity starring John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, and more!
Very small screening at Sony last night. The print looked amazing, very clean, and no digital effects were missing, etc. Seemed like a finished print.
I'm a huge Mangold fan. Heavy, Copland, and Kate and Leopold are great films. Girl, Interrupted is an interesting failure with good performances. I was stoked to see this flick so I grabbed my wife and fellow reviewer The Keen Guy and did the long drive from Burbank to Sony in 5:00 traffic. I saw Old School earlier this week in a test screening and commented in the thick of traffic that I wouldn't have driven this far for fucking Old School.
Sony theater had a great sound system but it was cold as witch nipples.
Identity is one hell of a movie.
Mangold shoots his first 2.35 scope film and it looks amazing. This Hitchcockian thriller is one hell of a ride. Ten strangers end up at a motel in the middle of the desert during a huge storm. All are in some sort of trouble. Ten Little Indians style they start getting bumped off. Eventually as we try to figure out who the real killer is, reality starts to shift and we realize that something is definitely amiss.
Amazing performances all around, especially from Cusack who has wanted to delve into material like this since he signed on to do James Cameron's A Crowded Room, which didn't get made. Cusack is so good here. A retired cop now limo driver who is forced to get back into police mode when the shit hits the fan. Liotta is at his deranged best. I know you're thinking that Liotta's the killer because he's nuts, but Mangold's too smart for something that obvious.
Great twist ending. There's no way to see this one coming. It's a slam dunk ala Sixth Sense. Everything falls into place and makes sense at the close.
I stayed after for the focus group after and their were some real dumb bells there who just didn't get it. Hopefully they won't fuck with the film. It's solid now. Identity works as a nice bookend to Heavy. It deals with some of the same themes and Pruitt Taylor Vince even pops up for the finale.
Mangold is one of our best filmmakers. To do Copland, then Girl, then K&L, and now this just shows that he can tackle any genre and blow it out of the water. One of our most talented writers. Can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
Had the pleasure of meeting Mangold and his wife, producer Cathy Konrad after the film. Both very nice and they seemed pleased with the response to the film.
Will be back soon with The Hours, Old School, Barely Legal, and more.
Write me! Do it!
There’s a major, major, major clue in that review as to where the film is headed, but you have to be familiar with old, unfilmed James Cameron scripts to get it. Meanwhile, this next guy didn’t like the film half as much. Let’s see why...
Hey Harry,
I'm a first timer so if I finish to quickly please forgive me, I hear it gets better with practice.
The other night I saw a screening of James Mangold's Identity, and since no one else seems to have written in, I thought I would get it covered. I went into this movie knowing very little about it aside from the cast, director, and the term "cop thriller", and as a big fan of Copland I was looking forward to it.
Unfortunately, the movie failed to live up to any little expectation that I had formed, and it turns out that James Mangold is the latest in a long list to fall prey to that terrible phenomenon of discontinuity drenched ensemble films that came in the wake of the first two in the (still unmatched) Tarantino canon.
The film revolves around 10ish characters all trapped in the rain at a seedy desert motel with a killer on the loose (and that is just the most obvious of a long string of 'Psycho' references - including images of hidden money and blood stained shower curtains, along with plenty of flesh wounds, a creepy motel owner who literally has skeltons in his closet, and a score so close to anything Bernard Hermann would have written just for a laugh).
There is some decent talent here (John Cussack, Ray Liotta) but the film is such a mish-mash of the script's attempts to maintain an original thread of suspense and the filmmakers' attempts to bombard the audience with unoriginal cinematic references that I could never keep real interest in anything happening onscreen (it doesn't help when you hate most of the characters with white-hot intensity either).
The most noteworthy advancement that the film made in the "psychological thriller" catalogue is that it tries to show what is actually happening inside the head of a criminally insane killer, and that idea is worth some kudos, but I couldn't help thinking back to the end of Psycho when Mother's face is superimpose over Norman's, and you realize that that is all you are going to get as far as a glimpse inside his psyche is concerned, and Identity's blatancy with the same subject matter left something to be desired.
Walking out I overheard somebody commending the film for being a "Hitchcockian/Tarantino-y thing". But now that it is getting more and more difficult to deny Quentin's influence on cinema and the imposibility of denying Alfred's, I'm not sure that warrants revisiting either director's collective masterpieces in a campy B-movie wannabe.
Hope you dig. Call me In'n'Out
Well, I’m going to have to see this one for myself. That ending is such an insane mindfuck that I’ve got to see how Mangold pulls it off.
"Moriarty" out.
