Out With a Bang. In Pacific Rim, Armageddon rises to art

摘要

Hollywood Loves To Imagine The End.Not of movies, which will always be around—remember the Beta tape of Hello, Dolly! That so entranced WALL-E in the arid rubble of future earth?—but of civilization as we know it. If our world isn't already postmortem, as in Tom Cruise's Oblivion and Will Smith's After Earth, then zombies are overrunning the planet (World WarZ) or we are in search of a Superman to stop an alien attack (Man of Steel). Washington must be especially vulnerable to terrorist attacks: Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down both imagined an imperiled POTUS, with the latter offering the image—tonic or scary, depending on your politics—of a black President with a gun. Pacific Rim, the new Armageddon adventure from Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, leaves the defense of the besieged earth to the professionals. 57-57 Tragedy at Fruitvale Station The first films to feature Oscar Grant were shocking amateur documentaries made by passengers on a train that left San Francisco In the early hours of Jan. 1, 2009. Trapped In limbo at Oakland's Fruitvale station while Bay Area Rapid Transit officers confronted a group of young men accused of fighting on the train, bystanders pulled out their phones as Grant—young, black and talk-Ing back—was pushed facedown on the platform and shot in the back by a cop. The vibrant Fruitvale Station (July 26), writer-director Ryan Coogler's assured and evenhanded debut, re-creates the 22-year-old victim's final day with an aura of bittersweet beauty, aiming to humanize Grant (Michael B. Jordan) while refusing to sanctify a man who had dealt drugs and done prison time and could blaze with rage. Coogler depicts Grant pleading for another chance at the supermarket job he's just been fired from.