Any movie critic can tell you what a newly released DVD is about & spoil the ending for you. I plan to ruin your entire DVD watching experience by highlighting it's flaws, it's missteps, it's examples of poor editing, casting, and point out the ridiculous holes in the plot. If you're cynical, you'll appreciate this valuable service I'm providing. If you're easily impressed, then don't say I didn't warn you.  - Mean Jean

I know, I know. Ray Charles music just doesn�t do it for you. Who cares, watch this movie anyway. It was surprisingly good, amazingly interesting, wonderfully compelling in spite of the subject matter. So well written & acted that it actually makes you care about the life of some guy you never listen to.

In a day when music stars of today wage bitter feuds over irrelevancies such as dressing room size, off stage amenities & other smokinggun.com silliness, Ray had to fight things like racism, people preying on his talent, taking advantage of him & marginalizing him because he was blind on his roller coaster thrill ride® to fame & fortune. Today, now that all the major injustices that the world that entertainment can fight & right have been fought & won. There are no �ain�t gonna play Sun City� style protests to catch the media�s fleeting attention, and even the questionable efforts of Live 8 are more aimed at garnering publicity than actually solving problems. So if nothing else, this movie can help today�s vapid wee ones appreciate that not all massively important dragon-slaying events need TV cameras with plenty of sound bites in order to be relevant.

This movie could have ended up becoming yet another vanity driven mess like �Battlefield Earth�, pushing the worship of an outdated icon. It sidestepped this trap by refusing to present exclusively the gloriously glowing highlights & goodness & hardscrabble struggle of Ray & his rise through personal tragedy to become some big famous dude. Also present is all the ugliness, all the pain he caused his family & close friends, even the stupid choices he made that ended up killing people close to him physically & emotionally. It also resisted the urge to go the opposite route & become a hatchet job on some guy lotsa people liked, in order to show them the fallibility of their former hero. That this movie was made while Ray was still alive makes this more remarkable.

I don�t think you should watch this flick cuz Ray Charles is such a wonderful guy to listen to, chances are, if you�re even slightly like me, you�ll recognize none to very few of the songs on the soundtrack.  But immediately after starting to watch it, I just betcha you�ll forget it�s a movie & be entirely drawn in to his world & story.
I�m not such a big fan of the �revelation through flashbacks� style of story telling popularized by The Blood Meister Q. Tarentino, but if you patiently endure this silly way of movie making in all it�s modern, soon to be dated glory, you�ll get an amazing story.

I don�t know how you feel about corporate awards like the Academy hands out to the one who displays the best pre- Oscar publicity campaign, but at least the Academy Award Jamie Foxx earned for this one was entirely deserved.

Buy this one new.

click here to buy the DVD