Ray
May 30th, 2006
Eargh, what pap. I’m still pissed I wasted two and a half hours on this–and we didn’t even watch the “extended version.” Jamie Foxx’s wobbling, whispering performance is somewhat interesting, but that’s the best thing I can say about this massive piece of schlock, with it’s cartoonishly exaggerated emotions, the stock flashbacks, the cliche heroin plot, the canned scenes of betrayal and heaven-sent inspiration. People thought this sticky, icky mindnumbing fest of stereotypes was best-of-the-year? Yuck.
May 30th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
That’s good to know. I never wanted to see this, but I think it is #9058 in my Netflix queue. And yet - -we both liked “Walk the Line.” What makes that different? Are we like George Bush and don’t care about black people?
June 6th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
I think the difference between Walk the Line and Ray is T. Bone Burnett. The way the music is used in Walk is just great. You come away loving the man.
There’s also a huge difference theatrically between popping pills and shooting up. The things addicts really go through become cliche when dramatized. With the pill-popping I think they just demonize the dealer and leave it at that.
I would have liked to have seen Walk try to tell more of his life. I would have liked to have seen him old and sick, dropped by his record label and getting together with Rick Rubin for one of the all-time comebacks. And that’s another difference, Walk is less ambitious in terms of the life story. Ends when Johnny is still quite young. Ray takes you further and ends with something that he himself was proud of, singing at the GA state capital, but that loses something of it’s heft when acted out.
I think the thing I really wanted from Ray was to see him on Sesame Street (or was that in there I can’t remember). That’s how our generation knew him…
February 14th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
[…] drug addiction, old age, loss, and death. But… no, je ne regrette rien… Unlike Ray, which covered similar stations of the artist’s passion with thudding predictability, […]