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Dancing_P [ 7.0 ]
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The life story of Ray Charles was just begging to be adapted to the screen: here is a guy who invented a new genre of music, fought segregation and got white kids to listen to ''black music''. On top of that, he was a black, blind heroin addict. The prospects were so tantalyzing that they went ahead and started production while Charles was still alive (a fairly rare practice in straight-up Hollywood biopics). The result of this is a perfect example of just-add-water filmmaking, a sort of Mad Lib biopic where only the names and basic events have been changed accordingly. What propels Ray into a realm beyond its cookie-cutter brethren (Beyond the Sea, anyone?) is the performance of Jamie Foxx. More ink (and pixels) have been spent on this performance than any other this year, so I won't go very deeply into that. I will say this, however: believe the hype. Foxx is every bit as good as ''they'' claim. The film begins with an 18-year-old Ray Charles (then known as Ray Robinson) posing as an injured WWII veteran to get a bus driver to lead him to Seattle. We then witness his slow rise to fame, starting out as the piano player to a backwoods country band, moving on to the McSons. We see the beginning of his friendships with musicians like Fathead Newman (Bokeem Woodbine) and young up-and-comers like Quincy Jones (Larenz Tate); his relationship with his wife (Kerry Washington) and his mistress (Regina King) and with what becomes the biggest player in his life, heroin. It would've been nice to see what a better director would've done with the material; although Taylor Hackford is a fairly competent director in a bland Hollywood sort of way, he never takes this anywhere we don't expect it to go. A director like Spike Lee (however inconsistant he may be) could have given this a n edge, a spark. Hackford's movie has plenty of heart, but not enough soul. It doesn't help that the last part where Charles goes into detox is ripped straight off of other movies, right down to the visuals. I was never of the opinion that a performance could make an OK movie in a good one; it took Jamie Foxx to change my mind.
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chapter11 [ 6.0 ]
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It's all well and good, and i wanted to rate "Ray" so much higher based on Jamie Foxx's uncanny performance and Charles's enthralling soundtrack; indeed, seeing Foxx so brilliantly mimic Ray's rascally humour and stage demeanor is a treat to behold, and the music performances, which embody the best aspects of the film's best assets (the Foxx performance and the Charles songs), are perfect. (Except for, of course, when the script calls for someone like Regina King or Aunjanue Ellis to lipsync-- it's kind of expected for lipsynching in biopics to be really bad, of course, but Foxx does it so perfectly here that when anyone else attempts it, it just looks kinda lame, like shitty outtakes from "The Temptations") But, since "Ray" director Taylor Hackford decided to make the film pretty cookie-cutter and faux-triumphant and overlong and hackneyed as far as biopics go, we're left to judge the film's two blemishness aspects-- Foxx and the music-- kind of apart from the film as a whole, because, really, they deserved to be in such a better picture.
But, Jamie Foxx is probably gonna win an Oscar for this, and you know what? I'm excited. He deserves it. Foxx is a skilled impersonator, but his "Ray" turn rises so far above mere mimicry: it's not just the fact that he's the only performer in recent years to convincingly lipsync, although that's certainly part of it, but it's the fact alone that never did it cross my mind that, damn, Foxx is really playing Ray Charles well, because it just didn't cross my mind 'till well after the credits rolled that I was watching anybody but Ray Charles. Which just proves that "Ray," after the musician's passing, belongs to Foxx and Foxx alone, and he deserves every accolade he's gotten. Subtract Foxx and the movie's a bore; keep watching him, he's the real deal.
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Jeff_Wilder [ 7.0 ]
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Jamie Foxx becomes Ray Charles. That's not just hyperbole, it's true. Watch Ray and you forget you are watching someone act you feel like you're watching Ray Charles himself. This is not just mimicry, this is genuine acting. Foxx's performance and the music contained in it alone make Ray worth a viewing.
Unfortunately, the movie itself isn't up to the level of Foxx's acting. View it seperately from Foxx and Charles what you're left with is a conventional bio-pic. It's better than other attempts. But on the whole Ray is the case of an unconvetional performance in an unconventional movie struggling to break out.
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| Weighted Rating | : 7.0 |
| No. Ratings | : 10 | |
| No. Reviews | : 5 | |
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