Hacker Cinema
Ray
2004 · Film · 152 min
Directed by Taylor Hackford
Born on a sharecropping plantation in Northern Florida, Ray Charles went blind at seven. Inspired by a fiercely independent mom who insisted he make his own way, He found his calling and his gift behind a piano keyboard. Touring across the Southern musical circuit, the soulful singer gained a reputation and then exploded with worldwide fame when he pioneered coupling gospel and country together.
2 positive2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
4 comments on Hacker News
> I must sadly conclude that there is no significant economic benefit to these ideas
Halfway through the movie Ray, about Ray Charles (a blind musician), I closed my eyes and watched the rest of the movie "blind" to ... try to empathize with the antagonist. It was a good theater, good sound system. The audio in the movie really helps. I remember a scene near the beginning with a cricket or grasshopper he was listening to as a child and the location of the sounds drew my eyes right to that spot on the screen.
There was a school for blind children near where I grew up and I had been to that school as a child, not because I'm blind, but for other reasons. After watching Ray, I was inspired to help the students there and developed a piece of software that blind people could use to "hear" things on the screen as they moved their mouse around.
I used it on sighted people. They could tell vaguely what was behind the blanked out screen with only sounds playing to indicate something was behind or under the mouse. "It's a tree!" they would say, when it was a cross, for example. I thought, "It works!"
So I took the software to the blind school and showed it to the administrators.
They sat back in their chairs.
"This is nice. I appreciate the effort you spent, but there's no aptitude in the students here for something like this, they couldn't learn to use this." One of them said.
I said, "Can we try? Can you give it to one of the kids with some aptitude and see if it'll help? I can make it better. I can work with them one-on-one and see if we can make it work!"
He kinda shook his head, "No... no I don't think so, but hey I've been wanting someone to help me with my website can you help me with that?"
So, there you have it.
I was so sad. So disappointed that I was shut down like that.
Brings a tear to my eyes just typing this out right now...
I guess my point is that ... who cares about economic benefit? Why is the world like that? I cared enough. I had no economic incentive. I just wanted to help people use computers better. Get access to things. Have a new way to perceive the world.
Why isn't that good enough? I had that inspiration and went out and did something to make the world better and the people in power, those in charge, shut me down.
Why on earth would he do that?
Yes, Hollywood isn’t very good at presenting the unvarnished truth.
I felt that the movie and particularly Salier’s (fictional?) role as a competitive observer of Mozart in the movie reifys the absolute genius of Mozart in a particularly effective way.
I notice that my daughter and her friends now really like Queen’s music because of Bohemian Rhapsody. In addition to Amadeus I’ve suggested The Buddy Holly Story, Ray, Coal Miner’s Daughter, and Le Bamba to her—all movies that I really enjoyed that might widen her appreciation of music outside of what she hears most today.
Ray, Ali, Color Purple, Glory, Django, Cotton Club, Boyz in the Hood, Friday, Malcolm X, Bad Boys, Barbershop, and of course, New Jack City.
Each of these movies did great and reached a wide demographic. As did Black Panther. The only difference is that Black Panther's marketing propogated this ridiculous myth that it was the first black superhero movie. (Sorry, Wesley Snipes, Will Smith, and Halle Berre... you're down the memory hole.) Or, even more absurd, that it is the first all-black cast that has done well at the box office.
Just shows how powerful marketing is.
More power to them... I've lived through several iterations of "'brand-new' microfiber technology that make cleaning up spills a snap!" I suppose I can live through endless repetitions of "the very first movie with a real-live black person in it!" Whatever....
It may not be "all fixed," and it's certainly worse in some parts of the country in others, but I believe it's gotten better, getting better, and will always get better (small pockets of extreme deliberate resistance notwithstanding).
When I watched the film Ray and learned about the life of Ray Charles, I was struck by how quickly (just 18 years, IIRC) Georgia's culture went from banning him for refusing to play a segregated concert to officially apologizing to him from the state government.