";s:4:"text";s:26386:"Profanity, violence and other facts of life. Shot on location in Oakland, Fruitvale Station, the feature debut of director Ryan Coogler, takes place on the last day of Grant’s life. The contrast between the audiences’ perception of Oscar and the way the BART police officers viewed him is very evident. The details change. “From ‘Brute’ to ‘Thug:’ The Demonization and Criminalization of Unarmed Black Male Victims in America.” Journal Of Human Behavior In The Social Environment, vol. Fruitvale Station, the just-released debut feature from 27-year-old director/writer Ryan Coogler, has already garnered critical buzz for the filmmaker and … But it’s the same tragic scenario: a white policeman shoots a young unarmed African-American male. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/movies/fruitvale-station-is-based-on-the-story-of-oscar-grant-iii.html. One being the criminalization and vilification of black men. His main intention — and his great achievement, as well as Mr. Jordan’s — is to make Oscar a fully human presence, to pay him the respect of acknowledging his complexities and contradictions. He left behind his girlfriend Sophina and four-year-old daughter Tatiana. Fruitvale Station opens with real cameraphone footage of the events of 1 January 2009, then flashes back to explore the final day in the life of 22-year-old Oscar Grant (played with superb realism by Michael B Jordan, previously seen in The Wire and Friday Night Lights). Oftentimes, finding jobs with a stable income and employment benefits can be difficult and many turn to illegal activity due to its highly lucrative and fast-paced nature. The film recounts an event that occurred in the Bay Area in California on New Year’s Eve of 2008, and completely focuses on Bay Side resident Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan). Debut director Ryan Coogler's Fruitvale Station is a film based on a real-life incident where a man was shot dead by a BART police officer in a case of racial hate-crime in America. The subtle, handheld cinematography style does play a part in lending the film a documentary type identity, but so does the detailed telling of Oscar’s story in the film. Fruitvale Station 2013 | R | 1h 25m | Dramas This dramatic rendering of a real-life tragedy recounts the final hours of Oscar Grant, shot by San Francisco transit police on New Year's Day, 2009. These “crimes” resulted in the extrajudicial murder of black men – lynching – carried out by whites in the community including law enforcement. And this movie is based on a true story. You get the sense that he might have made this movie even if the world had not handed him a terrible true story, and made any day in the life of Oscar Grant into a sad, touching and subtle film. The officers’ comportment is highly aggressive and impatient from the beginning. This racial ideology of black men is still prevalent in modern society when examining the justice system as a whole. Required fields are marked *. The deaths of these and other African-American young men (Mr. Grant was 22) touch some of the rawest nerves in the body politic and raise thorny and apparently intractable issues of law and order, violence and race. The film “Fruitvale Station,” directed and written by Ryan Coogler is a story based on the death of Oscar Grant. Oscar Grant is portrayed as a family man living in a low-income neighborhood and displays his daily efforts to remove his family from poverty. Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents. July 5 ... and actual events and their fictionalized extrapolations of real people. https://platform.virdocs.com/r/s/0/doc/233335/sp/9912007/mi/32625521?cfi=%2F4%2F2%5Bpreface%5D%2F2%2F2. Grant was a young man from Hayward, California who was fatally shot on New Year’s Eve after an altercation with a BART transit police officer in 2009. The notion of the black male as a “brute” or “thug” can be seen in history through the Jim Crow era when black males were seen as a threat to white society as well as specifically white females and were often wrongly accused of crimes. It demonstrates the ways in which black males are limited from reaching their full potential due to preconceived ideologies of what a black man should be, institutional racism, and state-sanctioned violence. The climactic encounter with BART police officers erupts in a mood of vertiginous uncertainty, defusing facile or inflammatory judgments and bending the audience’s reflexive emotional horror and moral outrage toward a necessary and difficult ethical inquiry. How could this have happened? This film follows Grant and his last days before the shooting on New Year’s Day. The lost dog he encounters at a gas station might as well have “Metaphor” stamped on its collar. This situation is very common among many low-income communities. The audience of the movie falls in love with Oscar and his whole family for their close-knit and unconditionally loving connection. “Fruitvale Station” describes Grant’s life and the events leading up to his death. Mr. Jordan plays Oscar Grant, who was killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer. Fruitvale Station Succeeds Thanks to an Exceptional Lead Actor Fruitvale Station is not a documentary, but it almost feels like one. This perfectly conveys the ideology of the “brute” or “thug” black male that the officers thought they were dealing with. In “Fruitvale Station,” the shooting takes place on New Year’s Eve in 2008. “Fruitvale Station” is the story of Oscar’s last day of life, conceptualized, written and directed by Ryan Googler, a young African-American man from the Oakland area and a student in the USC School of Cinematic Arts on January 1, 2009, the day Oscar died. Check out Fruitvale Station (2013) movie review, rating & box Office. "Fruitvale Station," a new film by Ryan Coogler, tells the story of Oscar Grant: a young, black Oakland man who was shot and killed on a train platform by a Bay Area Regional Transit police officer. Even after two stints in prison (one visited in the film’s only chronological digression), he is still selling drugs, and his vows to stop have the feel of New Year’s resolutions, inspiring more hope than confidence. The film “Fruitvale Station,” directed and written by Ryan Coogler is a story based on the death of Oscar Grant. Written and directed by Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale station was his first feature film. In the text “Freedom on My Mind” racial profiling is defined as “Using race, rather than specific evidence, to determine how a person should be treated.”(Martin, Bay, and White) It is also noted in the text that “An inordinate number of African Americans are imprisoned for minor offenses because they are more likely than whites to be arrested.”, Oscar comes to a turning point in which he throws away his stash of drugs which symbolizes him letting go of a lifestyle that imprisoned him for many years. How did we — meaning any one of us who might see faces like our own depicted on that screen — allow it? But Mr. Coogler, a 27-year-old Bay Area native who went to film school at the University of Southern California, examines his subject with a steady, objective eye and tells his story in the key of wise heartbreak rather than blind rage. The most heartbreaking part of the film is the end in which Oscar Grant is shot, unarmed, in front of his friends and family. The Struggle of Representation: FRUITVALE STATION //Philip Conklin Fruitvale Station depicts the last 24 hours in the life of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old black man from Oakland, California who was shot and killed by police early in the morning of January 1, 2009. And, in truth, Mr. Coogler has made that movie, even as he has also made one full of anger, grief and frustration. There is a dehumanizing violence in this habit, a willed, toxic blindness that “Fruitvale Station” at once exposes and resists. Fruitvale station, is a story about the real life Oscar Grant, a black man who was shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer in Oakland. Ryan Coogler’s directorial debut film,“Fruitvale Station” gives viewers a lens into the final day of Oscar Grant’s (Michael B. Jordan) life, a 22 year old man who was fatally shot by police in 2009. While dealing drugs comes with high risk to all that choose to participate and black people do not participate in this at a higher rate than their counterparts, there is an alarmingly disproportionate amount of black males incarcerated for dealing substances such as marijuana than there are white males. BART officer Anthony Pirone kneed Grant in the head and forced the unarmed Grant to lie face down on the platform. Police brutality is a violent reflection of these ideologies that have continued in our society despite the laws in place that afford inalienable rights to all citizens in our country. His own mother, Wanda (Octavia Spencer), is still able to boss him around, and he spends a lot of the day shopping for her birthday party. “Fruitvale Station” showed and won in both Sundance and Cannes Film festivals. Harvey Weinstein’s big Oscar hopeful this summer is “Fruitvale Station,” a true story about the fatal Oakland shooting of an unarmed young black man that arrived with almost miraculous timing. 'Fruitvale Station' runs risks with real-life story. Fruitvale Station garnered a good deal of buzz at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, after which the Weinstein Company acquired the film for a hefty sum.This preview doesn't exactly show what spurred the fevered purchase, but it does display a good deal of dramatic promise. This movie can foster critical thinking, but it can also draw the viewer in to experience the raw emotions and suspenseful moments of this real life story. At the beginning of the film, Sophina pleads Oscar to stop dealing marijuana. But Mr. Coogler, with a ground-level, hand-held shooting style that sometimes evokes the spiritually alert naturalism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, has enough faith in his actors and in the intrinsic interest of the characters’ lives to keep overt sentimentality and messagemongering to a minimum. Finding a video of the phone footage at Fruitvale Station on YouTube reveals a CNN video that stresses the “fictionalised account” of the story in the film. Oscar also displays his caring and empathetic nature throughout the film. The officer who killed Grant was charged with involuntary manslaughter and served a mere 11 months in jail, claiming he mistook his gun for his taser. Ryan Coogler, the director of "Fruitvale Station," narrates a scene from his film. All of these scenes convey his goodhearted and nonviolent nature. 26, no. Mandingo, (center) and others managed to shut down the Fruitvale BART station, on Wednesday Jan. 7, 2009, in Oakland, Calif., as hundreds protested the … Fruitvale Station: A Story of Police Brutality and Institutionalized Racism. This film highlights many injustices that black communities face in the modern era. He is a devoted and loving father to his young daughter Tatiana as well as a caring son to his mother and the rest of his relatives. He dotes on his daughter, Tatiana, and seems sincere in his desire — if not entirely steady in his resolve — to stay with her mother, Sophina (Melonie Diaz). Fruitvale Station, ... “Audiences at our Festival connected to and were compelled by the real-life, horrifying story of Oscar Grant and his murder at the Fruitvale subway stop. At one point in the film, he is brought to tears when he discovers on the side of the road a wounded dog that was hit by a car. Your email address will not be published. The streets of Hayward, Oakland and San Francisco and the cars of the BART trains are places of happy chaos and spontaneous solidarity, but also contested spaces where violence often seems close at hand. According to the author, “This term has become the platform to dismiss Black life as less valuable and perpetuates a negative and criminal connotation in forms of micro-insults and micro-invalidations. Even as it unfolds with a terrible sense of inevitability, “Fruitvale Station” is rarely predictable. Fruitvale Station is a 2013 American biographical drama film written and directed by Ryan Coogler.It is Coogler's feature directorial debut and is based on the events leading to the death of Oscar Grant, a young man who was killed in 2009 by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle at the Fruitvale district station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in Oakland. These scenes are integral to the main message of the movie because they show Oscar’s humanity. Smiley, CalvinJohn, and David Fakunle. The Times critic A. O. Scott reviews "Fruitvale Station. As played by Michael B. Jordan (Vince Howard to devotees of “Friday Night Lights,” though to fans of “The Wire,” he will always be Wallace), Oscar is a case study in confusion, unsure of where he’s going and a source of worry to those who love him. Though dramatic licence has been used in the reconstruction of these events, the facts are straight. “Fruitvale Station” is a quiet, unassuming story about the shooting of one common man. Moreover, the recent killings of unarmed Black men have sparked discussion and discourse surrounding the term “thug” and how it is used in the context of reshaping perceptions of Black life broadly and Black males specifically.” (Smiley and Fakunle 2), These stereotypes of black males have been around for hundreds of years and have been perpetrated by white society as a means of oppression. The film opens with real camera phone footage taken on that fateful New Year’s Day in Fruitvale Station. Oscar is burdened with the decision between providing for his family and engaging in illegal drug activity, he is also burdened with striving to be the best man and father he could be and simultaneously being viewed by outsiders as a dangerous criminal due to his skin color. Fruitvale Station is exactly that kind of film, and one that really succeeds due to it’s brevity and direct message. In 2020, Fruitvale Station is absolutely necessary viewing for its poignant true story that discusses race and systemic injustice in America and because it shows the raw talent of Ryan Coogler Steven Winn. ". Some data of activist organization claims estimated that one in three African American men in the United States will be incarcerated at some point in their life. “In the United States, Black men are six times as likely to go to jail or prison as white men.” (Smiley and Fakunle 6) This is largely due to the tendency for law enforcement to racially profile black individuals. Among the negative vocabulary used to describe black males is the word “thug,” in an article titled “The demonization and criminalization of unarmed Black male victims in America” by Calvin John Smiley and David Fakunle, this word is well-defined. These are qualities that go against the stereotyped, vilified notion of the black male. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. An independent film written and directed with stunning effectiveness by newcomer Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station is based on a true story, and even though its story of an unarmed black male who is shot on New Year's Day, is pulled from national headlines, the film is a character study of the choices in life and how a cruel twist of fate intervenes. This theme is demonstrated in a beautifully complex manner throughout the entirety of this film. One of the most disputed moments in Fruitvale Station (2013) is the scene wherein Grant comforts a dying dog at a gas station. Your email address will not be published. He is, for one thing, irresponsible and not always honest, unable to admit to Sophina or Wanda that he has been fired from his supermarket job for chronic lateness. 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