Word: mangold
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Johnny Cash wrote two very entertaining books about his life--Man in Black and Cash: The Autobiography--that don't suffer much for not being entirely candid. But when director James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted; Cop Land) and his wife and producing partner Cathy Konrad (Scream, Identity) started to mine Cash's tales for a screenplay about his early struggles with drug addiction and his relationship with wife June Carter Cash, they hit dead ends. "There are enormous holes in those books," says Mangold. "We wanted to dramatize a period of several years...
...Cash and Carter to open up, Mangold spent hours with them on the phone and at their Hendersonville, Tenn., home. He asked general questions (To Johnny: What did it feel like to do drugs? To June: Do you recall the first time Johnny touched you?), tape-recorded the answers and worked them into his drafts, which he shared with the couple. And finally, a few months before Carter and Cash died (within four months of each other in 2003), he found out that they had given in to temptation one night after a show in Las Vegas, that Carter...
...under us once again. The movie’s ultimate revelation is so ludicrous, so whimsical, and so utterly in defiance of mathematical probability that it obliterates any of the psychological intrigue that hadn’t already been undermined during the movie’s second half. If Mangold had played it straight, without attempting to grapple with grand themes and a controversial finish, Identity might have been a much more successful film. As it stands, the movie faces an identity crisis as severe as any of its characters?...
...initial premise is clichéd but promising, and during the film’s early scenes, director James Mangold does a satisfying job of building genuine tension around the first few murders. Alongside each dead body, there lies one of the motel room keys, counting down from “10.” Primary suspects in the killings start dying, at which point the group learns that the motel was built on an ancient Native American burial ground. And when one of the characters runs off toward a row of eerie blue lights in the distance, he inexplicably...
...under us once again. The movie’s ultimate revelation is so ludicrous, so whimsical, and so utterly in defiance of mathematical probability that it obliterates any of the psychological intrigue that hadn’t already been undermined during the movie’s second half. If Mangold had played it straight, without attempting to grapple with grand themes and a controversial finish, Identity might have been a much more successful film. As it stands, the movie faces an identity crisis as severe as any of its characters?...