Over the weekend, I saw Ray. I loved the music, Jamie Foxx's piano playing and his portrayal of Ray Charles. While the movie highlighted quite a few of his songs, my favorites included "What'd I Say", "I Can't Stop Loving You" and "Georgia On My Mind".
The film hardly showed Charles in a sympathetic light. Covering his life from 1948 (when he was 18) through 1965, with flashbacks to his early childhood, we see that in addition to being an extraordinarily talented musician, he was also a heroin addict and philanderer. While overcoming prejudice, breaking down musical boundaries and churning out hits, he was developing and nurturing a drug habit that would prove more crippling than his blindness. In the end, I think it was a well-told story of a gifted, but troubled artist.
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I had heard rumors of his heroin addiction. It puts his song, "I Can't Stop Loving You" in a totally different light for me now. I am kind of torn on whether I want to see it.
Yeah, the movie changed the way I heard a couple of his songs, like "Hit the Road Jack", which he played and sang with Margie Hendrix, one his mistresses, after she told him to hit the road. I'd recommend seeing the movie, but it might be more worth it to rent it.