Sounds like the DVD of ‘Ray’ is well worth checking out, even for peeps who saw the movie in the theater:
Too often the “extended editions” of popular films released to DVD seem to contain little more than a few minutes of filler scenes that didn’t work well enough to be included in the theatrical cut, or moments of sex, violence or crude humor that had to be softened to get the rating the studio wanted.
That’s not the case with “Ray,” Taylor Hackford’s account of the life and times of Ray Charles, played by Jamie Foxx in a performance that earned him an Oscar nomination last week. The Universal Home Video disc contains an option: push one button and the film unfolds in the 152-minute form in which it played in theaters; push another, and a substantially different movie appears, incorporating 24 more minutes of material that adds considerably to the film’s rhythm, dramatic depth and complex, ambivalent vision of its subject.
I rented Ray last week and I was amazed out how long the extended version was. But it’s a really great movie and Jamie Foxx was so good.