Ray 2004: a musical masterpiece of a legend's life

I’m not a huge fan of single movies. Partly because they’re too short for my liking and also because I think the fact that the plots are rushed to fit the entire story into an hour or two hours of screen time. They leave it a chunk of things because well, there’s only so much story you can force into 2 hours.

I haven’t seen a single movie the past month…until this one. Last week, I was scrolling on Twitter and I found this thread about “some movies you need to see”

Ray 2004 made the list and there was a lot of likes and retweets on that particular choice so I figured hey, let me check this out. So I went ahead and downloaded it. I didn’t regret it when I watched the film.

Coincidentally, prior to me finding it on Twitter, I saw several clips of some emotional scenes in the movie on TikTok. I didn’t know that was the movie when I saw it on Twitter until I downloaded it.

About The Movie

The movie revolves around the life of a blind man with a tragic upbringing gifted with music, Ray Charles Bobinson. I can't tell for sure whether the movie is based on a true life story, but it seems it is. Maybe with one or things added to make a story.

Ray grows up with his brother and mother, but unfortunately watches his brother drown at a very young age, goes blind years later himself.

To toughen him up and prepare him for what the real world is, his mother enrolls him in a special needs school and starts teaching him how to master his other senses and use them to his advantages as he starts going blind slowly.

Lucky for Ray, he’d already learn how to play the piano before the blindness happened and the piano becomes his ticket out of the trenches.

He makes his way go Seattle for a playing gig and his journey to fame and riches kicks off from there. Hit record after hit record, billboards, grammies and sold out concerts. Jackpot!

Celebrity life comes with it’s perks though. And not just good stuff. Ray gets himself entangled in a life of drugs womanizing. Sleeps with almost every woman he works with, even knocks up one of his lead singers and gets busted with heroin some time. That’s right. A blind man. Fascinating.

Things spiral out of control as the drugs and women almost becomes his bane. He almost loses his job and wife, but lucky for him he’s able to turn things around and go back to being the loving and focused man he used to be and gains recognition and an apology for having being banned to play in the state of Georgia because he refused to play in front of a segregated audience 20 years ago.

Comments

I thought I wouldn’t like the movie first because the setting was in very old times, so I felt the movie would be too basic for my liking. There’s also the fact that the movie was about music and I’m already not a big fan of single movies themselves, talk less of a single movie about music.

But I was surprised. This movie performed marvelously for a movie I had preformed conceptions about. The story and the acting were on point and it happened to be one of the very few movies that were able to force an emotion out of me and make me feel something.

The biggest inspiration of the movie is that disability is no grounds for failure. Ray is a blind man, who has accomplished something that despite adversity, success can still be achieved if you’re determined enough and put your mind to it.

You also learn to not lose your humanity because of your experiences. Ray's experience with backstabbing gives him a paranoia that leads to him not being able to trust any one else he later works him, and even leads to him betraying Jeff, the one person who never took advantage of Ray's blindness. The paranoia is what breaks Ray and leads him to choose the depressing life of drugs and women.

They paid a lot of attention to detail in this movie. Like how a blind person can tell when they just walked through a door using the sole of their shoes if they’re wearing some specific kind of shoes.

Or how Ray is able to tell whether a woman is beautiful or not by feeling her hand. A question I was hoping the movie would’ve answered for me was how blind people are able to read, because Ray explains how he’s able to do almost everything else.

The movie also throws some light on the nature of family and friendship. And by family, I don’t mean people bounded by blood, I mean people who mean a lot to you. The only real family that actually cared about Ray was Atlantic Records. Even though in the end they didn’t have the best deal to offer Ray, they took good care of him, had his back and helped him take his music to a whole different level when he was with them. Through out Ray’s career, it’s been cheat after cheat as record labels promise to pay Ray one thing and give him another, starting from even his own pal Gossie. Or should I say Empire’s own Lucios Lion?

Most importantly, the movie shows how much drugs and women can ruin your life. Drugs and women are the perfect wrong combination for any man with success in mind. They both lead to unhealthy addiction and Ray found that out the hard way. To get his life back on track Ray has to get his priorities right once again and choose hapiness and that’s another aspect the movie touches. Priorities - what do you consider most important to you?

(Not really relevant, but) some of my favorite quotes from the movie....

"You think pennies, you get pennies. You think dollars, you get dollars."

"Scratch a liar, find a thief."

"You don’t taste poison, it kills you."

Over all, the movie is amazing and I'd recommend it to anyone to watch, especially if you're looking for something based on real life events or relating to it and carries a message.