Now I push you too

Yesterday my eye snagged on the headline of an article about the Sundance-feted film Push, based on the novel by Sapphire—"Wrenching Film Poses Marketing Challenge."

Then a few pages later I saw a short review of...Push. Which I skimmed, vaguely thinking, That's odd, how is it that the movie is already out, wasn't Sundance just yesterday? But I supposed it could happen—I was still pretty tired.

I was dimly aware that the plot seemed to have little connection to what I knew of the Sapphire book. ("The story," according to the first article, "centers on an illiterate and obese African-American teenager in 1980s Harlem who is pregnant with her father’s child — for the second time — and is also abused by her mother.") I jumped to the last line of the review, which struck me as really weird: "Trust me: when those Chinese brothers scream, more than your ears will be bleeding."

Later I was eating a cookie and reading the review again and realized, This can't be the same movie:

At a time when most of our high schoolers struggle to make change without electronic help, the proliferation of movie and television characters with special abilities is more than a little utopian. In “Push,” these abilities are rooted in Nazi experiments to transform people into biological weapons, and the movie is crawling with clairvoyants, mind controllers and human bloodhounds.

(Headline for this post comes from here.)