Fruitvale Station

When: Saturday, February 15, 2014

With Who: By My Lonely

Where: The Crib

How: Why you all up in my business?

Synopsis: Based on the true story of Oscar Grant, New Years Eve 2009

 

 

Never heard of this? Where ya been? Well, click here for more info about this flick.

I admittedly was not familiar with the real life incident of Oscar Grant before this film came out. If I put a consistent effort in to all of the incidents where someone died for senseless reasons I’d kill myself for senseless reasons. There’s just too many incidents like this.

But this post isn’t about that situation per se. It’s about the movie that spawned because of that unfortunate incident.

Oddly enough for me, I found the movie to be slightly disconnected from the severe emotionality of that incident. Being someone who was not familiar with the situation, I was expecting to feel it. This is the kind of movie, like any other movie based on a real life situation, that you expect to hit you hard even though you already know. Let’s take a movie like Titanic. We know what happened but watching the details of that movie really put us there and vested us in the story, the scenario, the tragedy. From a movie perspective only I did not feel this movie.

My thoughts:

• (spoiler alert) I was so surprised at the subdued reaction from the family when the doctor told them he didn’t make it. That was this movie’s chance to spill its guts. The real chance to captivate us. His girlfriend in the movie had more passion when he told her he lost his job two weeks ago then she did when she found out he died.
• I can forgive the mother for the lack of emotion. She was, or at least was played, like she never got emotional. I don’t recall her raising her voice at any point in the movie.
• But to have zero emotion except wanting to see him when she found out he died was still a little odd to me. The entire feeling of it felt disconnected.
• Admittedly I may have had too much of an expectation for the emotion. That’s only because that’s what I would expect would happen when a 22 year old is killed unexpectedly and tragically. Particularly from his family.
• Would have been nice to have a funny moment in the film. Any funny moment. Anything half funny. A funny character. A funny line. Something funny. For crying out loud, SOMETHING!

Overall it was a very poignant movie. It did its absolute best to paint Oscar Grant as a great guy who didn’t deserve to die. We figured that. He seemed to have a great heart and I think that was supposed to make what happened even more tragic. But that’s all the more reason why the lack of emotion in the end surprised me.

Still, this movie is worth the watch.