Tag Archives: Michael B. Jordan

Fruitvale Station (2013)

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Despite my best intentions, I’ve always treated black people differently than whites. I’ve never had a close black friend, and while my racism tends to reveal itself in an obnoxiously patronizing amiability opposed to a violent bigotry or snide superiority, my presence here isn’t bringing us any closer to a post-racial America. Maybe that makes me the perfect audience forĀ Fruitvale Station, a film that endeavors only to tell the dreadfully true story of Oscar Grant in all its agonizing detail, and ends up carving a portrait of a man whose humanity is what makes his story so compellingly universal.

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Chronicle (2012)

We’re coming off a decade-plus of a widely collaborative and wildly successful “superhero movie” exploration, which has led to not just an impressive quantity of genre-specific titles, but a remarkable variety of stories and treatments. Which is all just a nice way of saying that the superhero flick has been done to death. Don’t get me wrong, some of the most exciting movie events of all time have been for superhero movies, and more than that, a keystone of the Visual Effects Renaissance has been movies about people with astonishing, life-altering, brightly-colored powers. But as the market goes, so goes Hollywood, and the marketability of comic book stories is in decline. Fortunately, nobody bothered to mention this to newcomer Josh Trank, who has somehow, someway, created a comic book movie that satisfies the craving while remaining (gasp!) wholly original.

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