Fruitvale Station

[Matt]

Wallace from The Wire moved south to become Vince Howard from Friday Night Lights is in this out in the West Coast. And supposedly this is his breakout performance.

Stars lined up Monday for the 19th annual Los Angeles Film Festival’s red carpet gala screening of Fruitvale Station, the acclaimed film from up-and-coming writer/director Ryan Coogler.

The screening attracted Hollywood heavyweights such as Forest Whitaker, one of the film’s producers, and star Octavia Spencer,as well as the cast’s friends and family and festival attendees. With a slew of awards and critical acclaim under its belt, Fruitvale Station has many in Hollywood talking.

Has gotten a lot of awards at Movie Festivals.

Coogler’s film depicts the true story of Oscar Grant, a troubled 22-year-old Bay Area resident who was shot in the back and killed by BART police on New Years Day, 2009. Opening on the early morning hours of December 31, 2008, Fruitvale Station is Coogler’s fly-on-the-wall recreation of Grant’s efforts to turn a new leaf on that fateful holiday. Grant’s killing sparked a national outcry over social and racial injustices plaguing the United States, and the event’s reverberations are still felt throughout the Bay Area.

 

[BigBucs]

Prolly about%10 accurate but Ill pirate it.

 

[Sharkweather]

Chad Michael Murray has been reduced to playing a villainous police officer in a Sundance film? Damn.

 

[Houston]

Chad Michael Murray has been reduced to playing a villainous police officer in a Sundance film? Damn.

After following up Freaky Friday with A Cinderella Story, I thought there was no stopping him.

 

[NAHSTE]

Chad Michael Murray has been reduced to playing a villainous police officer in a Sundance film? Damn.

I mean he was in House of Wax with Paris Hilton and Cousin Skeeter, not like he's above this shit.

 

[Matt]

Been reading tons of reviews on this movie. Talks of Michael B. Jordan doing a award winning performance. Also talks of this being a possible award type movie.

Deadspin just wrote an article on the movie as well.

<header class="mtm mbl" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); margin-top: 10px !important; margin-bottom: 15px !important;"><header class="mtm mbl" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 10px !important; margin-bottom: 15px !important;">http://deadspin.com/fruitvale-station-will-make-you-cry-like-a-baby-717221638

Fruitvale Station Will Make You Cry Like A Baby

</header>Early in the morning on New Year's Day 2009, a 22-year-old man named Oscar Grant, on his way home with his girlfriend, was shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) cop while at the Fruitvale BART stop in Oakland. The incident was captured by dozens of commuters on a stopped train, and the footage, seen below, became a flashpoint in the ongoing conflict between law enforcement and minorities. (Warning: The footage isn't graphic, but it is disturbing.)

The film Fruitvale Station opens with that exact video, and it quite obviously hangs over every scene in the movie. We follow Grant, played by Michael B. Jordan (Friday Night Lights, The Wire), as he goes about his day leading up to the fateful events at the train station. He visits his girlfriend and their daughter; he almost sells some weed but doesn't; he tries to get his old job at a deli back; he reflects on a short prison stint; he visits his mother (Octavia Spencer) on her birthday; he even pauses to help a dying dog off the street. In its script the day is like any other. But writer-director Ryan Coogler infuses Grant's travels with a quotidian menace. Grant's life,and the lives of many like him, can spin out of control if just one thing goes wrong. What happened to Grant was a horrible accident, Coogler argues, but not that accidental.

The movie stacks the deck a little bit, fudging some facts and inventing some characters for maximum dramatic heft—a nice woman Grant helps out and flirts with during the day turns out to be on the station platform, for example—which is a problem only if you are pedantic and chilly anyway. This is a movie about a tragedy, a pointless, stupid tragedy, and it wants to wring every emotion from it. This is not a subtle film but it is a deeply earnest one: It wants you to feel just how much was lost.

The primary reason Fruitvale Station is so affecting is Jordan, who turns from plaintive to giddy to menacing to scared without missing a beat; he makes sure Grant is not simply a symbol but a person. (There's a scene when Jordan's mother visits him in prison in which Jordan is breathtaking; he shifts gears, like, seven times in seven seconds.) Jordan's Grant is a confused, sometimes troubled kid, but one who's always good-hearted, always trying, almost getting it together. You can feel the squandered potential. It's a devastating performance. Spencer has the requisite grieving mother role, but boy does she hit it out of the park; she'll knock you over.

Then you have the train-station scene itself, the big closing setpiece. Coogler's smartest move is to start it out with something wonderful, an impromptu dance party on the crowded train, which isn't realistic—people don't like to look at other people on trains, let alone dance with them—but feels spontaneous and right. And it just punctuates even harder what happens next. The scene is staged with the right amount of confusion; there's still some debate as to exactly what happened—the officer who shot Grant claimed he meant to grab his taser; the courts ultimately agreed—and Coogler is able to step back for a moment and show us just how scared everyone looks, including the arriving police officers. (The scene is chaos, madness, exactly the type of situation that would lead to a deadly mistake.)

And at the end, there is Oscar Grant, a sweet kid trying to overcome some dumb decisions, and getting closer, with a family that loves him and might have gotten him there. What happened to him was a fucking tragedy, and Fruitvale Station drives that home in the most powerful way. It's not a perfect movie. But you will cry your eyes out anyway.

</header>.

 

[Matt]

"Fruitvale Station" is more than the dramatization of an obituary. It's about empathy.

In recounting (and slightly fictionalizing) the final day of 22-year-old Oscar Grant's life, first-time writer-director Ryan Coogler has made a film that piles small daily gestures – and one final, heartbreakingly tragic one – into an inspiring reminder about basic human decency.

That may sound trite, but "Fruitvale Station" – already a hit on the festival circuit – resonates not just for its portrait of injustice, but because its argument for treating strangers kindly, decently, comes at a time when fear and presumption often trump simple kindness, and the public sphere is navigated in cellphone bubbles.
In a star-making performance, Michael B. Jordan plays Oscar, the San Francisco Bay Area ex-convict and former drug dealer who, famously, was fatally shot by a transit police officer early on New Year's morning, 2009. The moment is glimpsed in raw cellphone footage at the start of "Fruitvale Station," before shifting back to the morning before and the start of Oscar's last full day.

On its surface, it's a regular day of errands. But all of the stops reflect Oscar's struggle to balance his past, his unemployment and his family: girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz), four-year-old daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal) and mother Wanda (Octavia Spencer, also a producer of the film).

He's hotheaded and imperfect, but he listens to his mom, helps strangers (like a supermarket shopper in need played by Ahna O'Reilly) and, in the surest sign that a dose of martyrdom has crept into the portrayal, tends to a dying dog. It's a day, presumably like any other, of fraught improvisation for Oscar, a young black man trying his best in circumstances stacked against him.

Jordan, the talented young actor of "The Wire," "Friday Night Lights" and "Chronicle" – who's in nearly every scene of the movie – puts the film on his shoulders in an unqualified display of leading-man charisma. It's a naturalistic, hoodie-clad performance, with "bruh" warmly peppered throughout his speech. His proud posture is belied by friendly, intelligent eyes and an awe-shucks smile.

Coogler intimately captures Jordan's performance with fluid camera movement while illustrating Oscar's constant text messaging on the screen. The Oakland-native's passion for the story is evident as he transfers with sure-handedness from the sunny, day-in-a-life meandering to the frenzied action of the devastating nighttime finale. Though Coogler verges on ham-fistedness, he's crafted a film not just heavy with racial truths, but one whose humanism reverberates.
For a movie about an unjust death, "Fruitvale Station" is bursting with the colorful, messy striving of life. The fullness of Jordan's Oscar is as staggering as his end is appalling.

"Fruitvale Station," a Weinstein Co. release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America "for some violence, language throughout and some drug use." Running time: 90 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

 

[Goober]

Some revisionist history right here.

 

[NAHSTE]

Some revisionist history right here.

It's a movie.

 

[mgoblue2290]

Don't mind Gooby, even if a black guy is on his stomach with two cops on him he still thinks he deserves to be shot.

 

[Houston]

I honestly didn't even know of this incident until I saw the trailer awhile back.

 

[CaribbeanJoseph]

I honestly didn't even know of this incident until I saw the trailer awhile back.

:walker:

 

[Matt]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jordanzakarin/trayvon-martin-fruitvale-station-george-zimmerman


Article on movie and Zimmerman trial.

 

[strahanfan92]

Very excited for this.

 

[Misogi]

STRING! WHERE THE FUCK IS WALLACE!

I'll probably see this in theatres.

 

[Palooza]

Vince Wallace will get a lot of Oscar hype, but will be snubbed a la Elizabeth Olsen.