The relationship between trains and movies is as old as cinema itself. Slightly less old is the relationship between people and video stores. And yet, as Jeff Goldblum reminds us in Jurassic Park, nature finds a way. Why not celebrate the inauguration of the new light rail line with a trip to the Stranger Genius Award–winning Scarecrow Project, where you can pick up any and all of the following transit-based movies.
Fruitvale Station
This movie is brilliant. It also leaves you with the perfectly appropriate feeling of being furious that it exists at all. Oscar Grant was the unarmed 22-year-old black man shot to death by a transit cop in an Oakland train station—Fruitvale Station—on January 1, 2009. Filmmaker Ryan Coogler got permission from BART to shoot the murder scene on the very platform where it happened. In the end, Coogler chose to make a fine-boned movie that follows a single day in Grant’s life, his final day. He uses a wealth of details to make mundanity sing. JEN GRAVES…