Fruitvale Station Essay

Fruitvale Station is a movie about a 24 year old man named Oscar Grant. The movie and review portrayed Grant as any African American lower class member working at a grocery store, but gets fired for being late a couple of times. Prior to working at the grocery store Grant was said to be an ex-convict with a police record trying to reform himself, a drug dealer, and a guy who cheated on his girlfriend, the mother of his child.

Oscar Grant was reported to be rowdy on the train and was shot at point-blank range. The policeman later revealed he was trying to grab his Taser not his handgun. While reading this review, the author was using present day situations such as the Zimmerman case to reflect on how two different cases can be the same but in different standpoints. Trayvon’s incident was not recorded, but Zimmerman was reported to be running behind an unarmed suspected to have a gun. The author wanted to say that cases are similar considering that both officers were not prosecuted. A better example he could have used was the Walter Scott shooting. Both men were believed to be causing a disturbance, the policeman was trying to grab their Tasers, and someone was

shot when the situation could have been dealt with without violence.

“Oscar’s no angel, nor is he a martyr.

Played in a brilliant, star-making turn by Michael B. Jordan (who TV fans know as Friday Night Lights’ quarterback Vince Howard, and, of course, Wallace from The Wire), he’s a bit of a mess-up just barely holding it together for the sake of his family.” I have seen this quote in many different ways on reviews and decided to say that coming from the environment and the time he was living Oscar Grant was trying to live a normal life after having problems facing jail time. Even after being able to obtain a job Grant tried to change I disagree with the reviewer because of the fact that Oscar did not let his past hold him back from becoming a law abiding citizen. The way the reviewer describes Grant is as another African American man, but his story is like any other

told.

At the end of the movie and the article both talk about arguably how Oscar was on the verge of turning his life around. In Oscar’s final day his life takes a turn for the worse and ending with Oscar riding a train to go see the New Year’s fireworks and a flashback to a traumatic period in his life where he was in jail and his girlfriend visiting him. “All aboard begin their own impromptu countdown—one of those great moments experienced all too rarely in city life when everybody realizes we’re all in this together, so we’d better make the best of it.” This movie was a story of how your day can change the entire world and show the mystery behind people think of themselves as a higher power than others.

Oscar Grant story is a really traumatic one in which someone puts your life in their hands in turn making one decision where the whole world takes note of how people who are supposed to protect and serve takes away an innocent man’s life out of cold blood.