"Kids of the Great Depression" loved Ray

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2004)

My wife and I spent the afternoon attending a matinée showing of "Ray". Bottom line, we thought it was totally emotion charged........taking you to super highs with Ray Charles's music and down to the pits with gut wrenching scenes of southern poverty in the early 1930s, heroin addiction/rehab, and social segration of the blacks during the 1950s and 1960s. Jamie Foxx played the role of Ray Charles to perfection. We will give him the biggest Oscar ever built for his performance.........
This movie is a must see. Watch carefully the sharecropper scenes in north Florida in the early 1930s. The story focused on the Ray Charles Robinson family. But rest assured, this also portrayed the way our parents earned their living taking in laundry, boiling the bed sheets in black pots, then hanging them on rows of clothes lines. to dry. Please note the pitiful furniture in the shacks, the lack of screens on the windows, and the dirt and mud of the area. But rising above these impoverished scenes, you sense the pride and determination of these wonderful human beings. This is what you would have noted about our parents during their "hard times", their pride and determination to work hard to get out of that economic disaster called the Great Depression.
Ray left Florida and headed to Seattle by bus in 1948. In 1948, I was 13 years old and I was completely oblivious to the segregation that existed in my South during that time. "Colored Only" signs were everywhere, the back of the bus, waiting rooms, bathrooms, restaurants, etc. "Separate but equal facilities" was the way we lived at that time. Watch how the movie takes you through that period....but try and feel the way the black people lived under those rules of that society. Then watch how the blending of the races occurred after 1964 ( the Civil Rights Act). I watched "Ray" this afternoon in 2004, and felt very ashamed for being a part of the white establishment at that time.
Listen and feel his music. You will probably dance in your seat as we did when the band performed "What'D I Say".. You will "tear up" as your we did as Ray slowly sang "Hard Times". Then listen to the way the film's director made you aware of Ray Charles' sensitivity to the tiniest of background sounds.....the humming bird at the window, the cricket on the floor, the last note of a musical score. You will agree that you have never heard "surround sound" so gently and poetically used in a movie in your life.
We hope your experience in this movie is half as rewarding as it was for a couple of old "Kids of the Great Depression". Please see it.