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Fruitvale station facts12/27/2023 Oakland, after all, is on San Francisco Bay, which appears in a scene in which Grant drives out to the shore to sell drugs to a friend but instead dumps the contraband into the water. These difficult lives are juxtaposed with the beauty of their location in a way that should feel deeply familiar to Californians. One of the film’s better scenes is of the grocery manager refusing to rehire him, explaining that while he likes Grant, he wants to save precious jobs for people who show up to work on time. Grant’s own joblessness, which is related to time he spent in state prison and to a lack of discipline, is his core problem. Their lives are defined by work-the girlfriend in some sort of service job, a friend at a grocery store, and the mother in what seems to be a mid-level managerial job. We see the struggle in the daily routine of Grant, his girlfriend (and the mother of his daughter), his friends, and his mother. The film takes place over the last day of Grant’s life. and the state- Fruitvale Station captures the constant struggle, the enduring beauty, and the cockeyed optimism that define today’s California. Not unlike Chinatown-which got some facts wrong and ended with a senseless police shooting but managed to say something essential about L.A. But the facts-versus-fiction debate misses what’s great about Fruitvale Station: not the tragic crime at the end of the story but the pitch-perfect portrayal of the everyday lives of Californians. And there are plenty of points to make about the particulars of shooting. Semi-fictional films often spark such criticisms, of course. An influential Variety review accused Coogler of creating a film that rings “false in its relentlessly positive portrayal of its subject.” ![]() The character we see on screen is probably more sympathetic than the real article, who spent two years in jail and had multiple run-ins with the law. What’s imagined are many of the details about Grant (played by the irresistible Michael B. The officer was charged with murder but claimed the shooting was an accident (he reached for his Taser and grabbed his gun) and was convicted on a lesser charge, spending only 11 months in prison. What’s fact is that videos of the shooting, a horrific incident captured on cell phones and posted on the Internet, show BART officer Johannes Mehserle shooting a defenseless Grant in the back as Grant lies face-down on the platform at BART’s Fruitvale Station. It has also been garnering criticism for departures from the real-life story on which it is based. Written and directed by the young Bay Area writer-director Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station has picked up critical acclaim. The most significant California film in years is Fruitvale Station, based on the shooting death of a 22-year-old Hayward man, Oscar Grant, by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer on New Year’s Eve in the first hours of 2009. ![]() In this state, our fictions are often better teachers than the truth.
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