Push (2009)

Watching Push again after a few years have passed. I'm wondering if this movie is considered as iconic as it seemed to me today with the re-watch.

I don't remember noticing the first time around that Chris Evans in this role echoes the physicality of the young Daniel Day Lewis (say in My Beautiful Laundrette) to a preternatural degree.

They share a lot of traits in that strange language of physical nuance.

And they largely share the same bone structure and very similar facial profiles, so it was like Day Lewis redux.

Dakota Fanning struck me as almost an anime character come alive. But then so did several other characters in this.

The movie does seem to take its greatest inspiration from the history of comic books....right up into anime. There's a real rectlinearity to the movie. Frames are everywhere. The idea of framing is sort of a core component of the plot. Framing in the many senses of that word.

The movie's palette is wild. But then we're in Hong Kong. The two main principles of design in Hong Kong seem to be feng shui and horrible color choices.

And that's what you see in this movie. Wallpaper patterns that look like the opiate-dreamt background in a Klimt painting. Pollock in gold lame, little Klimt paranormal squiggles. Strange that a movie can have me talking about its wallpaper.

But then the idea of the movie is that reality is basically wallpaper, so focusing on surfaces isn't probably too far from what the director wants you do anyway. Because the movie is about that too--the surface ruffles on the water of reality that alter the image you're looking at. The movie's sort of drunk on the idea of subjective reality. But that's nothing new. A large proportion of science fiction movies, to name just one genre, consider that almost a staple.

But the idea is here we're halfway between a martial arts movie and a science fiction one.

The acting is good but it's sort of irrelevant. I feel weird saying this but I really believe it's true: this is more a designer's movie than an actor's.

At many times, I began to get the impression the actors were subtracting from the sets. And they were doing a fine job. It's just the sets are so....fascinating.....like I'm thinking of the calculated ugliness that seems to run through the original Solaris.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. Surface. Grain. Comic book. And all.

And Chris Evans is the man with the perfect lips.

And, I imagine, Dakota Fanning is probably a pedo bear's fantasy come true.

To me, she still came across as a gifted child actor, but she's definitely on the verge of adulthood here. It's odd. Like watching her be a typical thirteen year old in one scene, and then almost convince you she's an adult in the next. You sense how hard she's working here and how she likes the challenge.

She has that strange, pallid Renaissance beauty, rather like a Sittow painting.

Or is it more Pre-Raphaelite? Her hair in this definitely moves her looks in that direction. Looks more than a little like one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's chlorotic waifs.

I wanna read some movie criticism and see if this movie is considered influential.

Okay, I just learned I'm completely wrong.

It got a 22% on Rotten Tomatoes. And for the audience numbers only a 47%.

So, a dismal failure.

And yet I liked it.

A lot of the telekinetic visual effects came across very much as naked artifice; that is, the seams of the computer manipulation were sometimes visible. But, oddly enough, it made the movie feel even more like older comic books, with their jagged splorts of noise for sound effects.

But I suppose admitting that the acting might have been superfluous isn't really saying something that a director probably wants to hear.

The plot was decent enough to keep you just barely there. But there are scenes where things like a melamine bar top just totally melts your mind with the degree of lime green it has soaked up. Just a short leap from Van Gogh's middle of the night tavern with pool tables to this.

And yet I'm okay with that.

The idea of ennobling garishness and seeing what happens. What happens is interesting. The director also has a good eye for setting up trick shots (the scene where a painting behind a character seemed to give that character a blue set of arms) and pseudo-trick shots. Things like strange lamps made of crystal beads where you can't tell which way the image goes--that is, if it's avulsed or involuted. These are strange, careful effects.

The idea of cooling down acting in a movie. Why not? Some genres do it all the time.

I salute the idea.