Midweek Mention... Identity

Identity

Dan: Hey, shout. Was this.

Reegs: mine

Sidey: That was it,

Reegs: It was identity, which was a 2000. And. Three John Cusak movie that I'd seen years and years ago directed by James Mangold, who was the guy who did the Wolverine Logan and the underrated cop land that I talked about on the podcast. And I, I remember watching this movie and thinking how bizarre. It was, and also watching it with a friend who guessed the main twist within about five minutes of the movie starting.

And we kind of ripped him and said, that's ridiculous, blah, blah, blah. And then it turned out to be what was actually happening in this movie, which starts with the poem.

yesterday upon the stair. I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. Oh, how I wish he'd go away. Which the narrator himself claims he made up, but it's actually an 1899 poem by the American poet.

William Hugh is huge. Mearns called Antigonish, AKA, the little man who wasn't there and I'm sure his parents, we probably all read this little ditty a few times a week.

Dan: No,

No. Why would we have read that to kids?

Reegs: dunno. It's in a book

Dan: I've heard it before, but I definitely,

Pete: spooky though Doesn't it Just

Dan: if I read

Pete: the shining, fail

Dan: if I read that to my kids, I'd wonder what the fuck I was talking about.

Reegs: Well, you have to give him some context that he's going to read you a poem. Not I'm just going to

Dan: but then they'd still go. That doesn't make any sense. Can I just ask, did your friend guests the whole plus. And like that all of it, or just the who done it

Reegs: pretty much everything.

Yeah. Which is, which is really amazing because this, this

Sidey: we were, we went early on One of the the main twist.

Reegs: Okay,

Sidey: good,

Reegs: good, good, good.

Dan: I, at a point in the film I wrote, because I watched this with Cindy and.

In the film I wrote on my phone in a note who I thought it was. Yeah. And then I put the phone down and didn't touch it for the rest of the thing. And then at the end,

Reegs: can we see that phone now? Have you got

Dan: I've got this phone.

I deleted the note though, but Cindy can just can vouch vouch for re

Reegs: I thought he's going to be some Darren brown shit where you're going to be like, and here it is. And I,

Pete: About halfway through this and then realized that I'd watched this before.

Reegs: but you still didn't

Pete: I still

Reegs: was

Pete: was up until about halfway through.

Dan: same. I had no idea. I was about halfway through and I started remembering things about the film without actually remembering the film itself or ever having watched it really, really weird. Or now I'm thinking that maybe. I hadn't watched the film and I was having some kind of like psychotic episode and I was breaking down loads of multiple personalities and shit.

Pete: this film does.

Dan: Yeah.

Reegs: If you haven't seen the film, there may or may not be. That we may or may not. Well, you can't talk about the movie without talking about it. I

Pete: No, not really. So it's this guy all at a hotel in.

The Bates motel or something.

Reegs: Well, it starts after that creepy poem, it goes into this like weird intro that kind of like seven esque type feel to it. And it's narrating about a convict named Mack, Malcolm rivers. Who's awaiting execution for several vicious murders that took place at an apartment building. And we see these like journals with scrolls and stuff in him.

And we see his psychiatrist, Dr. Malik, who was.

Sidey: Alfred Molina.

Reegs: Yeah, from that we recently saw in boogie nights and enjoyed. And he is there's obviously some sort of hearing going on about Malcolm and his sanity or otherwise. And then we do get a cut really to an incongruous looking scene in the rain, a motel

Pete: big storm coming big storm coming in and everybody for one reason or another ends up at this motel. I mean, you've got all kinds of characters in you.

Ray Liotta turns up as a cop

with.

a, another, with a convict.

Reegs: well the convict is Jake BC. He's. I mean, everybody is hamming it up to a million in this movie. It's a competition out of Railey, Otter, I think. And Jake BC as to who can deliver the most ham or

Dan: Is there any relations relationship relation relation to Gary

Reegs: he's both related and related to yeah.

Dan: Cause I love Gary V see with all my heart,

Pete: The world's longest, no NFL in point break,

Reegs: We've got limousine driver, ed Dakota, John Cusak, callously, most down lady and the opening credit really, really in the opening

Sidey: it's just going to deal with it. And he's very, like,

Reegs: he's

more annoyed that Rebecca who I didn't even realize it was until after the movie, but he's more annoyed that she's on the phone

than anything.

Sidey: Well, she's just had like a caricature of a nugget, real nasty piece of shit,

Yeah.

Reegs: And we've also got the incredibly named Paris, Nevada, Amanda Peet looking quite hot. She's a sex

Sidey: very hot. right?

This is

the second movie, but it was the first but there are two movies. where John Q sack has played a limousine driver.

Reegs: Yeah, because it would also be

Stereo outside the apartment? No, it's not

Sidey: that's say anything.

No, it's a 2012 disaster baby and He is limo's evening, Amanda.

Reegs: In that movie

Sidey: Yeah. Yeah,

yeah

Reegs: That is interesting. We've also got the York family, George Alice, and they're not at all strange nine year old son, Jimmy. And Alice, as we said, is mowed

Dan: pretty weird as well.

Reegs: Yeah, they're all, they've all got an issue

Pete: these characters

Reegs: Mo doubt. Yeah. And she gets taken back to the motel because it's really getting nasty out there. And John Cusack decides it's too far to, they can't call an ambulance, an ambulance. Can they? Cause all the phone lines are

Pete: Oh, that's right. Cause she's injured. She's she's really badly injured.

Sidey: Losing

a lot of blood,

Pete: losing a lot of blood, the storm won't let anybody out and they're fucked in there. And then people start dying.

Dan: Well, this there's a couple as well. Some newlyweds who've

just been married in Vegas, I presume. And they're, they've been married about nine hours and but things aren't particularly harmonious in that marriage.

Reegs: she's pregnant as well as

Dan: I think she

Sidey: knows that

Reegs: she's not pregnant,

Sidey: She says that she has, but then she,

later admitted

Reegs: it was bullshit.

That's Suzanne Caroline, Suzanne, the washed up actress is knocked off. I can't even remember exactly how she

Sidey: she's decapitated And they find her head in the

Dan: And the tumble

dry

Reegs: dryer

Sidey: the number

Dan: we haven't introduced the the guy who's running the motel which is I

Reegs: well, it was John Hawks, but it looked like ed Norton. I thought it was ed Norton the whole way through.

Dan: but I recognize him as cause he's in the very earliest scenes of from dusk till Dawn as well.

Pete: Y

Dan: that guy in the petrol station and he plays it's really cool. Cause you don't know what's going on in that scene and it's kind of the, some sort of similarities, like

Pete: he plays that guy. Well,

Dan: masking like a secret and he, he does that in cause he, obviously, he he's aware that they're being robbed in from dusk till Dawn.

And then this thing you find out later on in the film, they're not as, not all is, as it seems.

Reegs: Well, I mean, we might as well say because I mean, the story is kind of all over the case. It everybody's got a secret. It turns out for instance, that Larry is secret. The guy who looks like he owns the motel is actually that he turned up and they were killed weren't they there, the previous

Sidey: the

Dan: actual guy who ran the motel was also called.

Reegs: Larry

Dan: And he just died. He was at the front desk dead. So he moved him or somebody came in and wanted to know a room. And so he just took the money and then moved the, the body to the freezer and thought that someone would come along and that hadn't happened.

So he'd been there for a month, just running the motel as if it was his

Reegs: Yeah. You see, I wondered spoiler alert, I guess, but the dead personality there, the dead.

Larry the original Larry also there's another cop. Who's dead. Isn't there. Because

Sidey: Ray,

Reegs: auto turns out to be a convict as well and stopped him. I wondered if they were personalities that had been successfully sort of killed already because the big twist, should we be getting to that as people are getting knocked off

Pete: it was about right

Sidey: now

The Sort of court hearing, I'm trying to think of the right word

Reegs: It's the, it's a thing to, to assess his sanity or otherwise.

Sidey: they've, they've come in there like midnight. And so there, there There's a big expedition done without explaining exactly what's wrong with this

guy He is

A severe, multiple, personality disorder.

Later on. They illustrate that by having it, be John Cusack in the chair where they're talking to him.

in the,

Reegs: yeah, so it becomes apparent these two things that seem not connected. Basically the motel is kind of a place inside Malcolm rivers is mind where there are alternative split personalities.

Dan: Yeah, the projections of, of his personalities within his mind.

But the point of the hearing is that it's all, it's all come to a head to the reason why the convening at midnight is because Malcolm is due to be executed the following day and the, I guess the defense attorney and, and this

Sidey: the notebooks have been misfiled and they hadn't been able to be used as evidence in

Dan: That's right. Yeah.

Sidey: trial. So.

now that they've got the hands on their set and this guy, you kind of execute someone who

Didn't know that they'd done. that's you know, that's the statute. So they having to convince the judge at midnight, he doesn't

want to fucking know

And that's when you say that the two things mesh over.

Reegs: So then Cusak kind of like you were referring to, he gets brought into the room and we get a really cool scene really where Q sack is plucked from the motel and is suddenly inhabiting Malcolm. Body and this court hearing and he doesn't know where the fuck he is. And then when they show him a mirror, it's Cusak, but he looks in the mirror and it's the other actors face.

It's Malcolm. It's very, very well done. Then Cusak basically goes back to the matrix understanding now that he is just a personality and he has to get rid of the, the evil one, which at this point we're basically led to believe is railing. Because he's been very villainous all the way through

Dan: And, and, and now at this point, everyone has been bumped off in sort of sequence, or most people have been bumped off in sequence. Like you say, the, the failed actress lady has had her head cut off. The husband of the newlyweds has been stabbed while she was carrying in the bar in the bathroom.

Pete: It was a

Reegs: at Jake Boosie, Jake BC had an entire baseball bat shoved down his throat.

Sidey: That was the bear

Dan: Where I knew, I knew that I then seen the film before, because I remembered seeing that. And thinking, fuck

Reegs: there are other things in your internet history though, where

men

Dan: bats

Reegs: having large objects in their mouth. Aren't those

Dan: Yeah, there are. But the weird thing about this film is it was more like it was more deja VU than it was like a flat-out memory of having watched a film.

I still can't recall when I would have watched. Who with w you know, what point in my life, but I, it all kind of started coming back to me during the watching of this film.

Pete: Yeah. CA it came to me slowly as well, around that same time. When people would start, I think the explosion with the the

Dan: the wife,

Pete: Nevada and Timmy as they're running away, I think it's those

Dan: to, it was the wife of the

Pete: the wife or the

Dan: that's

Pete: And she was running away with Timmy because to get to safety John Kusama at this stage, he knows.

Going down and he wants to get those too, but the car explodes and everyone's dead there. You've got this final showdown then in the rain, when he realizes I've got to kill Railey auto in this big fight, don't they

Reegs: shoots him multiple times.

So it keeps on going, does he just walk it off

Pete: a, Terminator. It keeps coming forward, but. They both have this kind of standing knife in shooting thing going on.

And both of them dropped down.

Dan: I think it's, it's worth reiterating because we glossed over it very quickly about the room keys. So on each dead body or with each dead body, a room key is found and they are going down in instead of counting down from 10.

Cause that obviously becomes. A

Pete: complete head, fuck a complete head.

Fuck. Cause they, they only get to like 10 then nine. And by the time they get an eight, they start putting it together. What we find these keys down somebody's throat or in the pocket up there are so whatever the hell it is, and they all got one less numb and they realize, oh, there's 10 of us. And they also realize they're all born on the same day.

Sidey: discovery It's in the room on his own.

And he expected, they're all named after a state. he sees a map and then they're all the

same birthdays.

Which I've got the odds for that.

Pete: W w why, why you find them? It's it's an interesting concept though, that the doctor had said the medication that he was taking was going to mean that these personalities were going to have to confront each other.

And this was the battle going on in his mind, really of this patient who is obviously. Different problems and things, and everything is in his life has gone wrong because of one of these personalities or another has taken over and done some really

Dan: fucking

Reegs: well the one that went on a murderous rampage is

Pete: is the worst

Dan: and may the 10th is revealed to be the day on which all the murders actually happened, that Malcolm rivers committed the murder. So he's filling in the blanks, which I think is why the original motel guy was also called Larry. It's just all these convenient things to give people names, but those odd Sidey

Sidey: It's approximately one

in

115 sextillion

which

Reegs: That's the sexiest of all the Italians. Isn't it.

Sidey: 24

numbers long.

if he writes it out,

Reegs: Gosh.

Dan: that's the same as that phone bill or that French lady got by mistake. Yeah,

Sidey: And yet it

happened in this film,

so that's amazing.

Reegs: Yeah. Yeah. So with everybody basically dead, she fucks off now, still in his mind to Florida

Sidey: Yeah. Like he's, he's compartmentalize a little

bit of his mind. for her

Dan: I think, I think that says, because whilst it also cuts back to Malcolm, he's obviously been not acquitted because it.

But it's, he's been found insane. And he's saying, being, going off to the, to the funny farm and that I guess is like symbolic of, of his journey that he's going off to this orange Grove. Well, that's what this character is going to in Frostproof it, which is a real place in flow. So that's like, cause you can kind of see on his face that, you know, he's, he's in his happy place with

Sidey: this

Dan: character and I'd be in my happy place with her as well.

Reegs: Yeah. But it's not all happy because as she tends to her orange Grove law discoveries in the dirt.

The

Dan: motel

Reegs: key saying, number one, turn, turn, turn. And then she finds Timmy the little boy looking pretty menacing.

have a home and he's is he pounding it into is he's pounding his word into. And so basically it's revealed that the old Timmy orchestrated all the deaths,

Sidey: montage of him doing all the kills,

Reegs: which I really enjoyed it. I have to say

Pete: And at the same time Malcolm rivers is being transferred to a maximum security hospital to go and get reassessed. And he's able to then get free and kill both the driver and his

Dan: Well, yeah, you don't see the kill of the driver necessarily.

You just see

Sidey: slips off the

Dan: it swears off the road

Pete: not enough for you. He is doing it.

Dan: he's strangling. Alfred Molina and yeah, the, the van stops and that's.

Reegs: So what a preposterous movie, right? I mean, it's just insane, isn't it? That the whole split personality thing must be one of the laziest

things that you could ever have as a script. But yeah, it's a screenplay.

Dan: We,

I guess it's, you know, and nowadays it's really tough to do th there are films that.

Do that I've forgotten that this, that trilogy, that Scott. Yeah. So there's, there's that we looked to

Reegs: raising

Dan: raising

Reegs: this reminded me of raising

Dan: So there was that,

Reegs: goofy.

Dan: and, and obviously this was another, and this is 2003. And yeah, I I'd forgotten that it was the multiple personality disorder thing until the John Q sack scene. And then I realized, obviously it was, it was all in, in the head I'd remembered or not remember, but I D I guessed again that it was the boy, because there was some sort of nods to it when he just like, he just like, cause he

Sidey: didn't fucking Damien.

Dan: And he just like, get up, go off in the other room. I'm like, where's, where's he going? Why haven't they followed him?

Reegs: He in the logic of the movie, he inserted a baseball bat down, Jake

Dan: But obviously none of that happened. None of that happened. This is all a projection of, of

Reegs: makes the film really pointless. Doesn't exist. Like you watched two hours of nothing that actually happened.

Dan: Well, no, he, he did. And he killed all these other people and that, which is why he's on trial

Reegs: I, I enjoyed it to be honest, it's preposterous and silly, but I enjoyed

it

Dan: took it very much as I, he was having this like internal battle. It's a little bit, a little bit like nods towards shutter island as well.

Like

Sidey: he

Dan: got to defeat the character, the other characters or, or come to, you know, get closure of those characters that he's sort of dreamt up in his head. So up that guy that played Malcolm rivers, is it? Yeah. So he, I, cause I remember thinking like some fucking good acting, cause he has to jump between like

Sidey: various Yeah.

Dan: But he actually has that condition in real life. It's like his, he, he, he can't control like the

Reegs: looking at you.

Dan: eye movement.

Yeah. But it's, it's like jumping, it's almost like scanning

Sidey: constantly, Like

Dan: he has that condition in real life. And that's why he.

Be put in quite a few roles where he has to. Yeah,

Reegs: I remembered him from loads of movies, but none of which. Which is interesting, but I did write down that Brett Lee who played the insane Timmy, he had a whole host of a TV series and TV movies under his belt.

He also played a minor character in curb, your enthusiasm, which is pretty good, but he never really did anything. Obviously, director James Mangold, did the excellent walk the line, Yeah. Terrific.

Sidey: Johnny.

Cash. This,

Reegs: Yeah. Yeah. He did the Wolverine and Logan brighter, Michael Cooney. He did the snowman, horror movies, Jack Frost, and Jack Frost to revenge of the mutant killer snowman.

I think I need the first one of which I've seen.

Sidey: surprise me.

Reegs: But what, what, what did you guys think of this weird mystery? Thriller who done it? Horror thing.

Pete: I, I was pleased to say it again. Actually it was as I said, I'd forgotten about it up until about halfway through when I then knew what was gonna happen and, and who did it. But I carried on watching because it was a story well told as you say.

Different characters, preposterous in a good cost, well acted. And you know, even you, you, you man there who knew after five minutes, you kind of know what's coming eventually, but you stay on watch anyway because they're delivering it well and and slightly different to how you think it's going to come.

So it does surprise you like that.

Dan: I think it's, it's a film where that theme and that that's, you know, is, has been addressed before. And this is just done in another slightly different way.

Halfway through. I was trying to remember, because I've seen the film, is it bad times at the El Royale?

Reegs: I haven't seen that.

Dan: So I've seen that. And then I, at one point I thought maybe. It's it's similar sort of premise in terms of the setting and everything. It's a load of people coming together and all get an Allstate, a motel, but it doesn't end up with, with murder.

They've all got dark secrets and skeletons, but it's genuine. It's not a projection of someone's. Yeah. So I thought maybe it was that I think it's just the same. It's a similar sort of thing that we've seen before done in a, in another.

And I, I did enjoy it. I'm surprised I'd forgotten that I'd seen it before, but it, it did come back to me and I didn't recognize like the poster or anything like that, but yeah, I

Pete: John Cousteau. I liked Ray Liotta, you know, it was, it was a good cost. And as you say that the premise of a load of people coming into a motel or a hotel or anything, and you've got all these different characters, it's always interesting because you never know what's going to happen. And once murder's a foot, then it was who's next, really in it.

That's why you're watching it.

Reegs: it.

Yeah.

Sidey: Yeah, I enjoyed it. I, yeah, I really liked John Cusack and this is not his greatest role of all time, but it was good. Fun. The deaths

are pretty

interesting but we did sort of.

well,

Pete: how does Timmy do the bat

Sidey: yeah, it doesn't,

Dan: the point. He didn't do it.

Well, you couldn't. So, but why, why are we trying to explain it? How, how could he have, how can it, you know, cause the bodies will start disappearing because as he kills off those personalities in his mind, the bodies start this.

Sidey: the

Pete: the car explosions,

Dan: And there's, and there's no body, there's no bodies in the car. It's like, none of these things are actually happening. So that's why it's, I mean, it's in a,

if you're looking at remote hotel slash motel psychological thriller type films,

Okay. In the shining light looming over it and south. So it's never going to be up in

Reegs: don't reckon anyone's ever drawn the comparison.

Dan: No, but like in a remote

Sidey: motel. They psycho.

Dan: yeah, I haven't, which I haven't seen, but as I said, my Mrs was watching the series of that and it had like, you know, echoes of that as well.

Sidey: Yeah. I

mean, it's not as good as any of those, but it's, this is where to look and it was on

prime.

Yeah. So you could watch that.

for now if you subscribe for loads of

Dan: But we've just spoiled it all for you

Pete: to see, plus,

Sidey: Yeah,

Dan: you're a C

Reegs: and even a B minus.