A Cinephile's Instinctive Travels: Interstate 80, Oakland, California

A Cinephile’s Instinctive Travels: Interstate 80, Oakland, California

Reliving the people and places I encounter through the sights and sounds of the films they inspired.

David Liu | 25 July 2012

Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011)

Popping a CD recorded by his daughter into his car’s stereo system, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane ponders the biggest decision of his life.

I’m just a little bit caught in the middle
Life is a maze and love is a riddle

Halftime in America (David Gordon Green, 2012)

The best commercial from Super Bowl XLVI had Clint Eastwood playing the voice of recession-era America:

It seems like we’ve lost our heart at times, when the fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead.

Spanning 2,900 miles between downtown San Francisco and the New York City metropolitan area, Interstate 80 serves as one of the central arteries of the land — a river of concrete winding through farmland and industry, city and country, before merging with the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge in a spectacle of daily routine.

One takes the F bus west on the I-80 on a Saturday afternoon and looks out the window just before the bridge approaches, just as the wind hits the ceiling of the bus and the cars roll on into the setting sun, and behind them stand Oakland’s fabled cranes, perched like imperial lions at the waterfront.