‘RAY’ OPENS TODAY: Go see what all the buzz is about.



*The day is finally here; the wait is over. There’s nothing more we can say that hasn’t already been shouted from the rooftops about this film, and the mesmerizing performance of its star Jamie Foxx.

You know about the Oscar buzz, you’ve heard Foxx describe the physical impact of having his eyes glued shut for the role, and the challenges of learning the music cues; you’ve heard co-stars Regina King and Kerry Washington explain Foxx’s generosity and professionalism during scenes. All that’s left to do now is for you to go and see it all for yourself.


“I saw a level of commitment in Jamie Foxx that is very, very rare,” said “Ray” director Taylor Hackford, who spent the last 15 years, along with Ray Charles, trying to get the film made. When asked if anyone along the road to production had questioned his ability as a white director to tell Ray’s story, Hackford said:


“No. Ray Charles said this guy can make this movie. I have an entirely African American cast, I have a star who basically has made his success and his chops in the African American community. He understood that I had a passion for this piece and I wanted to be real in this casting as opposed to expedient – like who’s the hot person. I chose a writer, Jimmy White, who’s African American, from the South, and has experienced numerous things that are similar to Ray Charles. …I always make a film for a particular audience, and hope that it’s for the broad audience, but my audience here is African American, and I’ve screened the picture enough to African Americans to know it works for them, and it certainly works for the people who are my collaborators.”


In almost every interview about the film, Hackford has said it was divine intervention that the film took so long to get financed. Had it been filmed as intended in the late eighties, he wouldn’t have had Jamie Foxx.


“I was looking for somebody who was able to approximate Ray Charles’ look,” Hackford said of his search for the lead role. “It’s not like “La Bamba,” where nobody remembers what Ritchie Valens looks like so Lou Diamond Phillips, who doesn’t look like him, can come in and play him very well. I couldn’t do that with Ray Charles. He’s an icon. Everyone in the world knows Ray Charles, so everyone’s going to be looking through a microscope at the guy who plays the role. You live or die by that person.


“I met Jamie, I liked him. I wish I could tell you I knew he was a consummate musician, but I didn’t know it. I had just seen his acting work and knew that he had the right look. And then I found out that he started playing piano when he was three, and went to a university on a piano scholarship. And at that moment, I went, ‘This is it.’ I never looked at another actor.”


Hackford knew he had his guy, but there was one more person who had to approve Jamie before the deal was sealed. Hackford recalls the day he took Jamie to meet Ray.


“He sat Jamie down at a piano, there were two pianos side by side, and he started taking him through things. They played a little funk, a little gospel, and everything was kind of cool - and all of a sudden Ray broke into Thelonius Monk.


“Jamie’s background is not jazz; he was lost. And Ray didn’t let up, didn’t go on to something else. He kept saying, ‘Come on man, it’s right under your fingers! It’s right there! Why would you do that?’ It got almost embarrassing. And I’m thinking, this is gonna blow up in my face Jamie’s gonna storm out of here. But you know what? Ray was testing him, not just as a pianist, but as a man. And Jamie didn’t wilt, he didn’t run away, he stood there, he kept working it and working it, and he got it – a very complicated passage of Monk. And at that moment, Ray Charles stood up and hugged himself and said, ‘This is it, this is the kid, he can do it.’ Ray anointed him right there. And I watched Jamie Foxx grow to about 10 feet tall.”


Once the film was finished, Hackford screened a rough cut for Charles himself.


“He sat there for all of those scenes frowning his face, just listening – which seemed like an eternity,” remembers Hackford. “And finally, he started talking, [saying] ‘Yeah, that’s the truth; yeah, that’s right.’ He started getting into a little bit of dialogue with the screen. Ultimately, he loved the film. He said, ‘I’m really happy, Taylor. I’m really pleased’ That’s the best review I’ll ever get.”

NICE.
I'm not gonna miss it.

I heard he kept blinding contacts in alot of the time to really understand the disability.

Nice article.

Only thing I didn't like was that the director said his primary audience was black people.

Why? because Ray was black?

I know lots of people of diverse races who listened to Ray. He's a universal icon, not just a black icon.

I thought that comment was disappointing.

THIS MOVIE IS AWESOME!!!!..I went with a co-worker (she's 62, i'm 37) and we were both very impressed. Jamie Foxx should win an Oscar for this performance. The best i can describe it as 1/3 Purple Rain, 1/3 What's Love Got To Do With It and 1/3 Color Purple (strange mix i know...)...Purple Rain for the musical performances, What's Love..for it's 1960's era style feeling..Color Purple for its make something out of bad circumstances feeling. Even though it's a movie all people can enjoy, it willd efinitely hit home with black folks. the entire audience applauded when it was over (it runs about 2 1/2 hours)...Highly recommended!!!

SynthiaRose said:

Outstanding movie! After the movie was over and everyone was leaving the theater we were given a DVD (Exclusive video from the making of Genius Loves Company).
Ray Charles duets with Natalie Cole, Elton John, Nora Jones, B.B. King, Gladys Knight, Diana Krail, Michael McDonald, Johnny Mathis, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, and James Taylor, Genius Loves Company. I was totally surprised. Receiving the DVD reminded me of my beautiful summer with Prince where I collected my Musicology CD’s….. LOL.

meltwithu said:

Hmmm... so that means his guitarist is going to perform fellatio on Ray's piano while Ray himself is shirtless and wearing lace shades?

I'm not too crazy about MTV's articles but this one is intersting:


http://www.mtv.com/movies...tory.jhtml

Jamie Foxx May As Well Take That Oscar Now, By Kurt Loder

Jamie Foxx so completely embodies Ray Charles that his portrayal seems not so much a performance as an incarnation.


Awards people should probably just bundle up this year's Best Actor Oscar and FedEx it over to Jamie Foxx right away. Foxx so completely embodies the blind, brilliant and indomitable Charles that his portrayal seems not so much a performance as an incarnation. It's a spectacular star turn.

And the movie rocks, naturally. Over the course of a more than 50-year recording career (he charted his first R&B single in 1949, and his last album was released this past August, two months after his death at the age of 73), Ray Charles peppered the pop charts with hugely influential hits, from primal R&B classics to lush, string-drenched ballads. In his creative prime, in the 1950s and '60s, his hair-raising holler and freight-train piano excursions blazed an exciting new path through blues, gospel, jazz and country music, breaking down barriers both stylistic and racial. His signature recordings — especially the ones he made for Atlantic Records from 1952 to 1959, like "I Got a Woman," "Hallelujah I Love Her So," "The Right Time" and the titanic improvisation "What'd I Say" — are still amazing.

The difficulty in finding someone to convey this sort of prodigious musical talent onscreen is that the someone you get is usually going to be an actor, not a musician. In Woody Allen's 1999 "Sweet and Lowdown," Sean Penn, fine actor though he may be, was unpersuasive as a Django Reinhardt-like jazz guitarist because he clearly had only an approximate idea of what he was doing with the instrument in his hands. (I recall marveling at one shot in that movie in which Penn's fingers were scampering up the fret board while the notes we heard on the soundtrack were going in the other direction.) Jamie Foxx, a classically trained pianist, among several other things, has no such limitation. And he had the opportunity, early in the film's production, to sit down at a piano and play Ray Charles' music with Ray Charles himself (which must have been a daunting experience). So in the movie, when the camera drifts down to the piano keyboard during a song, Foxx's fingers are forming the actual chords, and hitting all the right notes. It makes a difference.

Foxx is also note-perfect in communicating a blind man's slightly tentative relationship to his surroundings. (He plays the role in prosthetic makeup that keeps his eyes essentially glued shut throughout the movie.) "My ears gotta be my eyes," Ray tells a friend, explaining that he always wears hard-soled shoes so he can hear his footsteps reverberating off corridor walls, and will know by a slight change in the sound that there's a doorway nearby ... or maybe something less innocuous. Foxx captures Charles' unwavering independence, too (he never used a cane or a seeing-eye dog). As for the man's cold and controlling side — something about which he was completely candid — Foxx nails that, as well, sometimes chillingly.

Ray Charles' story, as related here, is rich in social scope. It begins during the Great Depression, in Greenville, Florida, where 5-year-old Ray and his mother, Aretha (fiercely played by Sharon Warren, in her first film role), are living in ground-level poverty. Ray receives his first musical instruction from a local stride piano player, and takes to the instrument right away. Then he contracts glaucoma, and by age 7 he's lost his sight. His mother tells him, "Never let nobody turn you into no cripple" — an injunction he never forgets. She sends him to a school for the blind, where he learns to play saxophone and trumpet, among other instruments, and to write music in Braille. By the time he graduates, his mother has died, and he's left entirely alone in the world. Playing around Florida with local bands (including one white country group), he manages to save enough money to buy a bus ticket to Seattle. (He makes the trip by himself, sitting in the back rows of the bus set apart for black people.) There he forms a trio and begins recording for a local label, and he never looks back.

Jamie Foxx plays Charles as a shrewd, sly, funny man — a sightless flirt who judges women's physical possibilities by carefully feeling their arms for excess avoirdupois. ("I've had my eye on you all night," he tells one girl, after a quick wrist-jiggle.) He falls in love with and marries a demure gospel singer named Della (Kerry Washington), but out on the road, as she half-knows, he cheats on her with other women, principally the singers Mary Ann Fisher (the regally sexy Aunjanue Ellis) and Margie Hendricks (the feisty Regina King). He also starts shooting heroin — a habit that will ultimately end Hendricks' life and will plague Charles until 1965, when he's arrested by customs agents while coming back into the U.S. from a gig in Montreal, and is ordered either to clean up or go to prison. (He cleaned up, and never relapsed.)

Charles had a keen sense of injustice in matters of both race and business. In the early 1960s, he was the first musician to refuse to play segregated concerts in the South. This cost him a lot of money (the state of Georgia banned him from performing there "for life"), but he was adamant. He was also possibly the first R&B musician to negotiate a record deal (with ABC-Paramount) that gave him complete artistic control over his recordings and also allowed him to retain ownership of his master tapes — an unheard of thing at that time, and not exactly commonplace now.

"Ray" doesn't devolve into a dry and dramatically withering history lesson, but it has considerable historical interest — not least in the precision with which director Hackford and his crew have recreated the clothing (especially Charles' sleek silk suits) and the hairstyles of the period, and the élan with which they've imagined the bars and nightclubs in which Ray Charles once scuffled. It's also unusual in being a movie about black life and art, in which virtually all of the major characters are played by black actors, that was made by a white director and yet doesn't feel like a white man's sentimental racial fantasy. It feels real. And a large part of the reason for that is Jamie Foxx. He stands at the center of this very fine movie giving not just the performance of his career, but almost certainly of the year. If he ever tops it, we may all run out of adjectives.

— Kurt Loder

Bump!

Who else saw this sucka? Reviews people, reviews!

When does this film hit the UK? anybody?

i did!...and.IT WAS OFF THE CHAIN!

GO SEE IT.NOW

This movie was really GOOD..... Jaime was AWESOME, he deserves all the props he's getting..... in certain parts of the movie, u actually felt that it was Ray Charles himself..... kinda remind me of how it was with Denzel in Malcolm X.... Go see this movie if you get a chance... it is a must see!!!!!

aerdna25 said:

Damn, it must be seriously tight if since you brought that up

SynthiaRose said:

If it makes you feel any better, the majority of the audience for the show I went to early Friday evening was white people over the age of 40.

Actually, it was cool to hear so many people who have probably never seen Jamie's stand-up routine, or his sitcom, and who probably have no idea who "Wanda" is, singing his praises. And for once, the product lives up to the hype! Jamie has done some impressive work in recent roles, but this one takes the cake. I admit I laughed when I first heard he was doing this, but he shut me up real quick. The movie itself is outstanding. Great performances all around, even by the boy who played young Ray. Obviously, the music is great, and provides the backdrop for some of the movie's best moments. There are two scenes that really affected me emotionally. The first one was the scene in which Ray is arrested (without a warrant) for possesion of heroin. The way he was treated by the police, and the local press...man. It reminded me of the way that some public figures, especially Black celebrities, are continually being treated even today. The other scene comes near the end, after Ray finishes his detox, still struggling with his past demons. Seriously, grown men broke down sobbing in the theatre after that. It was heart-wrenching, but inspirational, without being sappy or clicheic.
I only have one minor complaint about the movie, and that has to do with the editing. There seems to be way too many pans and fade outs, and showy graphics. But it didn't really matter in the end. This movie still gets an A from me.

I saw it!

Really excellent movie. ****/5!!

Get the soundtrack (i got it for my folks). It's a great starter for Ray's music.

The Grudge still beat Ray at the box office.

God I loved this film

When the house lights came on I was all soaked in tears trying to hide it

aerdna25 said:

I really felt as though I was watching Ray himself. Jamie did a fantastic job. The movie was very well done and seemed quite realistic too. Ray was indeed a ladies man, but he was also a caring man that wanted to do right. And of course, the music speaks for itself. On a scale of 1-10, I would give the movie an 8. Very well done. I'm sure Foxx will get an Oscar nod too.

puts this on "must-get dvd" list...i'll be damned if i go to the theater to watch it.

Rhondab said:

Ray's expanding theaters this week. The Grudge and that awful "Saw" got the Halloween bump..but Ray should outdo them both since a whopping 99% of exiting viewers gave it an excellent or very good rating. Besides...any movie that appeals strongly to African-Americans and Non-African-Americans is a winner anyway. Every show was sold out on 3 screens for the entire weekend here in Maryland

The movie was absolutely great! I had to break out my Ray Charles CD box set when I got home. Jamie Foxx(Eric Bishop)really put it down!

Love & Light,

Quietsoul

Handclapsfingasnapz said:

And wwhhhat do you have against going to the theater!?!???

OdysseyMiles said:

there's always folks bein annoying/bothersome every time i go to the show. i'd much rather watch it in the privacy (and peace n'quiet) of my own home.

Handclapsfingasnapz said:

I feel ya. I LOVE going to see movies at the theater but I do understand that the whole experience can often be ruined by annoying people, their kids and their phones. Going to a matinee is great, because there's hardly anybody there. I never watch a movie with a group of people at someone's house. I get the urge to say "shut up" every 5 minutes, and that's so not me .

the movie was so good!!! I loved it, I might go see it again. Jamie Foxx did an excellent job in this role. He has to win this Oscar!!! Watching it, u forget that it's really jamie foxx up until the end when he is having a flashback (i can't give it away for those who haven't seen this yet) but oh my god, u couldn't have gotten a better actor than Jamie Foxx to portray Ray. Its really amazing, a bit long, but it makes up for it. Whoever hasn't seen it should go right away, asap to see it!!! It won't dissapoint.

Rhondab said:

this was because it was halloween weekend, duhhhh..... besides its more worth it going to see Ray than the grudge.
[Edited 11/1/04 9:50am]

OdysseyMiles said:

exactly. i like matinees too--if there's a midnight matinee of a movie i wanna go see and i got the money, i'll definitely be on my way over there to see it.

it's weird too, cuz i live about 6 blocks away from a movie theater and i could be watchin all these movies all the time but...the people...i'd end up gettin hauled outta the joint for tossin my pop at somebody gabbin on their cell phone.

This movie is awesome and I'm still trying to find the words to describe Jamie's performance!

Gotta get the soundtrack and some more Ray Charles music.

And I think I might just watch the next Oscar awards ceremony...

*****STARS!!!

JF Becomes Ray Charles. Its like going back in time. He will win a oscar for this one. No other actor this year or in recent ones even comes close to capturing every nuonce of a person the way JF does.

The music makes the movie work. Although he died, Ray lives through his music and his music makes the movie come alive and breathe. The best moments are watching Ray(JF) perform. He captured his life in his music, and that life lives on through the music. Fantastic!!!

Great learning points for musicians as well.

1.) Have your own style!
2.) Playing live can groom and polish you for the big time!
3.) Dangers like stealing, lying and dishonesty in the music biz!
4.) While stars are thinking of puzzy. Groupies are thinkng about baby'$$$...
5.) Never do drugs!...
[Edited 11/1/04 10:19am]