Second biopic in a row after Aviator. Same time period, too, and same tricks with saturated colors in the pictures. Lovely cars. Wow.
OK, here's my point about Ray. Great music. I love Ray Charles. Great imitation of him (doesn't seem that hard, but maybe it is).
BUT: OK, I'm bored to death with standard biopics now. Pleeeeeez this is the 21st century, movies have been around for 100+ years (or whatever) and somebody has got to do something. We need an Eisenstein for biopics or something. At least update them for the MTV generation.
Look: everybody and their dog now spends their life staring at screens with multiple mixed together sources of information. So the movies are like the only place in the universe where you get to see only one thing. That's nice, but... it's a little quaint, and most directors don't know what to do with it, so we get BORED.
And I'm getting a little pissed off to spend two hours at the movie theatre, be appropriately moved, rocked, wowed, etc., but then have to spend more time reading reviews or (God forbid) books to find out what was true and what wasn't, to get some critical perspective, because I come out of the movie and I know nothing. All I know is I've been artfully manipulated to death for I don't know what reason. Yeah yeah, artistic vision, whatever. Gimme facts, gimme data, keep the soundtrack, chuck the clichés.
I want it all. I want info bubbles saying: this girlfriend is a composite of Ray Charles's 15 steady girlfriends, and her child represents the 12 he had out of wedlock. I want that ticker tape CNN has under the movie constantly. Listen, I grew up watching movies with subtitles. It's not so hard.
There's tons of empty space where you can store extra info. Like all the teary flashback scenes where you find out why he became what he became. Oh please. Just give me the data, give me impressions, give me multiple points of view, and I'll make up my own mind, thank you very much.
Anyway, "What'd I Say" is just the best, best song*. They start the movie playing 2 minutes of it and then segue to historical stuff. I think they should have kept it on, all the time, on a loop, for the entire movie, mixed it and remixed it, locked the doors, forced everyone to dance, and served drinks and stuff. Now that would be a movie experience.
*(it's so good it's even good in midi (yeah, ok, I have crap taste, I know, I know... I can get off on a f-ing ringtone). Madame Yazukawa, how come you never taught me to play the piano like that or like this?)
Posted by Kai Carver at February 24, 2005 08:54 PMAt the very bottom of the Ray page on Metacritic (still way better than Google :movie, but, admittedly, one or two clicks further), an LA Weekly review that's pretty dead-on on the positives and negatives of the film.
Posted by: Kai Carver at February 25, 2005 06:28 AMAnd the Village Voice's Michael Atkinson has this great, great line: "Ray is so reflexive that it often seems to be about the procedural mechanics of biopics".
Here's the review's perfect first graf:
"For 20 years or more America's most beloved blues wailer as well as its most thoroughly forgiven celebrity junkie, Ray Charles is a Hollywood biopic grand slam, a walking, talking, grinning triumph over disability and poverty and dope and discrimination. Taylor Hackford's Ray, for its part, never drops a stitch, methodically working the rise-and-fall-and-rise formula without a single consideration for the viewer's self-respect or the possibility that even famous lives rarely have the shape of stories. Ray is so reflexive that it often seems to be about the procedural mechanics of biopics. Of course, goodwill is in absurd abundance; owner of the biggest smile and one of the most distinctive voices in 20th-century pop history, Charles is a charmed figure, easy for us to love ... and easy for the resourceful Jamie Foxx to impersonate."
Still worth seeing, though, or at least hearing. I think there was a blind guy in the audience at the UGC. It's funny how movies often attract an audience similar to their subject or authors.
And, to be completely honest, worth seeing for the MTV-video-quality reconstructions of black post-war clubs, and for some very hot looking women in period costume.
Though for good drugged-out black musician party scenes, Round Midnight was a little better, as I remember.
Posted by: Kai Carver at February 25, 2005 06:50 AMDitto Walk the Line on Johnny Cash.
Posted by: Kai Carver at March 27, 2006 10:10 AM