I finally saw Ray last night. I enjoyed it. I'm a big Ray Charles fan. I thought Jamie Foxx was brilliant. But I don't think this was a great film. There was a few things that really bothered me. The lip synching for one. I know, I know. It's hard to ask Jamie Foxx to sing like Ray Charles, but the guy is so talented, it would have been much better to have him sing than to have Ray Charles' real voice incongruously coming out of Foxx's mouth. It just didn't fit. The other thing I didn't like was the archival footage of towns Ray would visit. It felt slovenly and lazy for the filmmakers to stick these shots in rather than try to recreate them. This wasn't like JFK where archival footage of all sorts of mediums moved the story along. In Ray, it just didn't work. It felt out of place. It was wrong. That said, I loved the one short shot of LA where you could actually a Red Car moving along the street. When I was growing up in LA, I heard a lot of stories about the Red Car, about how LA was different place before cars and freeways, but I had never actually seen any video, let alone color video, of the Red Cars in motion.

So, to sum up:

Ray Charles :: awesome
Jame Foxx :: brilliant
Ray :: not so awesome
Red Car :: excellent