Playing Oscar as a complicated, vibrant, unfinished young man, Jordan revealed the vulnerability that’s always been central to his characters, even when they’re virile tough guys like Donnie Creed and Killmonger. Jordan’s performance may be what stays with you longest, though. People tend to think of Fruitvale Station as Coogler’s triumph, but it was an achievement shared by many who have blossomed right along with him. ) And Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson did his first film scoring on Fruitvale Station, later winning an Oscar for Black Panther. (She was the first woman to ever receive an Oscar nomination for cinematography, thanks to her work on Mudbound. Jordan has been front and center in Coogler’s two subsequent films, Creed and Black Panther, but it was also one of the first films for Rachel Morrison, who has established herself as one of our best cinematographers. Dramatic Prize, and he surrounded himself with exciting young talents that would all go on to do great things. The filmmaker was only 26 when Fruitvale Station premiered at Sundance, winning the Audience Award and the U.S. The writer-director has cited films like 25th Hour, La Haine and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days as models for Fruitvale Station - each takes place over just one day - but I also thought of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s stripped-down look at a school shooting that, like Coogler’s movie, builds in tension as we prepare for the oncoming horror. Oscar’s not meant to be a saint or, frankly, all that unique: He could be any young Black man in America who (as this country has discovered again and again) can be a target of racist, panicky people in positions of authority. But his mundane problems are constantly magnified by the fact that we know that this evening will end with his senseless shooting at that train station. For one thing, he’s unfaithful to his girlfriend, played by Melonie Diaz, and he can’t hold onto a job. He seems like a good guy, but he has his faults. Jordan, a rising actor who had been part of The Wire and one of the stars of the clever, low-budget 2012 sci-fi film Chronicle, as Oscar, an ordinary young man in Oakland who’s getting ready to go out for New Year’s Eve. Considering Coogler’s love of superheroes, Fruitvale Station now plays as an origin story for a major American filmmaker and his closest collaborators.Ĭoogler cast Michael B. Now streaming on Netflix, Fruitvale Station is a modest, heartbreaking dramatized account of Grant’s final day on Earth, and its first-film flaws are forgiven once you recognize what Coogler and those around him have gone on to accomplish.
In 2013, Coogler unveiled his feature debut, Fruitvale Station, at the Sundance Film Festival, announcing not just the launch of an exciting new writer-director but also the emergence of a formidable actor, creative team and social movement. So in seeing that I thought, ‘What if that was me?’” We wear the same clothes, the same complexion. Seeing his friends - they look like my friends. “I couldn’t help seeing myself right there,” Coogler later told The Nation.
(Video captured Grant being held face down by police when he was shot.) Coogler didn’t know Grant, but they were born about three months apart and had both grown up in the Bay Area. But during his time in Southern California, his hometown was in the news because of a scandal: the 2009 BART police shooting of Oscar Grant III, an unarmed 22-year-old Black father who was gunned down early in the morning of New Year’s Day at the Fruitvale Station. So I’d come back to my hood and read.”Ī fan of comic books - he’d sometimes come up with his own plots - he eventually decided against football, and a career as a doctor, to attend film school at USC.
The other kids had more money than I did. “My parents didn’t have a lot of money, which they spent on our education, to send us to Catholic private school in Oakland, mostly Black. “Before playing football, I didn’t fit in anywhere,” he said in 2013 of his childhood. If things had worked out differently, Ryan Coogler might have become an athlete.
0 kommentar(er)
