![]() ![]() He clearly loves his family, his mother (Oscar winner Octavia Spencer) and his daughter, and he wants to do right by them. ![]() He spends most of the day trying to get a new start to his life, a hard task for a 22-year-old two-time ex-con with a loyal, steady girlfriend (Melonie Diaz) and a child to support.ĭespite all of his efforts, though, Oscar is no saint. Jordan of "Chronicle" and TV’s "Friday Night Lights") and the day leading up to his fateful New Year’s train ride. Its remarkable timing may strike a raw nerve, but that’s why the movie is so necessary. Writer-director Ryan Coogler’s feature film debut – which comes with glowing, award-winning stamps from both Sundance and Cannes – arrives hot on the heals of the controversial Zimmerman verdict and a year in which mass shootings in places once thought unfathomable forced America to look in the mirror when it comes to its obsession with guns. It doesn’t solve problems it escalates them to a point of no return, so disturbingly fast and easily. It’s a small moment with such enormous, shattering results that could’ve been so easily avoided.īut that’s the problem with a gun. But suddenly, everything is wrong, everyone knows it and no one knows what to do. Nothing dramatic, just a brief pop amidst the noise of the irritated and likely buzzed station crowd. There are only two shots fired in the entire film – technically the same shot, seen once in grainy cell phone footage from the real-life event and again in a reenactment – and each one seems so small and yet so powerful. ![]() It’s this thought that struck me the most during "Fruitvale Station," the powerful, tragically true story of Oscar Grant, an unarmed man who was shot and killed by police officers while on a train ride home on New Year’s Day 2009. There’s so much unnatural power in a simple squeeze of a trigger, and the consequences are so steep.īut it’s just too easy to pull out the weapon, to use – or all too often misuse – its godlike ability to grant life and death, to kill a man and face the responsibility of that split-second decision for the rest of one’s life. With one decision, everything has changed for everyone involved. The wounds won’t completely heal, if at all. And once that line is crossed, there is no going back. The line between an angry altercation and a person dead is just too easy to cross when a gun is put into the picture. ![]()
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