Janis: Little Girl Blue

An experienced documentarist who poses her eye on one of the greatest in the history of music. Very remarkable the amount of footage of Janis in her glory days. Presetns a lot of testimonials from people very close to her(both professionally, and personally), which allows us to feel a little more closely, both the achievements and thesuccesses, as well as the sorrows and sufferings of the genius of Janis. Another positive aspect is the letters or written records of Janis. IT also lets us enjoy many moments of live music, which is always good in a music documentary. Very exciting and entertaining.

It has not been a different life than the other 27's. It has not been a different life than other real stars. Filmin structure was not good. I guess they did it without much effort. He did not elaborate after Janis's death. No special music was made for the film. I did not like your director very much. The film has not succeeded in dramatic places as well. It was not nice without Janis. There was an air of sadness. Although a girl who was excluded in her childhood and adolescence was given a nice star, she had not been given any details when necessary.

Janis Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas growing up with a conventional and accommodating family. Her high school years grew more bohemian during the civil rights era. Her looks were never conventional and she was ridiculed for it. She escaped to San Francisco. She got strung out on meth and returned home to recover. Her fiancé Peter abandoned her after getting another woman pregnant. She returned to San Francisco joining an old friend's managed band Big Brother and the Holding Company. She became a breakout star at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Her voice is always the star. There is obvious cooperation from family and friends. It doesn't mean that this doc shy away from her darker sides. Her addictions may be glossed over during the early days but her femininity issue is never that far from the surface. It covers her musical journey very well and gets enlightening glimpses into her private life. I would love more performances but this is not a concert film. Her performances are also used to highlight her struggles. This covers all the major points including the ups and downs of her career as well as her spiraling addictions. This is great for any passing fans.

Amy Berg's documentary charting the course that blues and rock singer Janis Joplin took from her childhood hometown of Port Arthur, Texas to San Francisco and then Los Angeles in the 1960s is filled with great clips and fantastic music (particularly the performance of the lesser-known "Little Girl Blue" shown at the conclusion). However, there's nothing here--not even the reading of letters Janis wrote home to her family--that will surprise anyone who has followed Joplin's career since her untimely demise in October 1970. Although she lived a wild, scattered but full-blooded life in her 27 years, Joplin's recording career was extremely brief (two albums, one with her first band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, followed by a solo album, released posthumously). Janis as a human being was anything but predictable, and yet the myriad of documentaries chronicling her life and stardom all seem to cover the same territory, the sex-drugs-and-rock and roll high-life. Berg insulates Joplin here, as Joplin was insulated by the yes-men in her life who were trying to steer her career. We do not hear about the books Janis read (she was a huge F. Scott Fitzgerald fan), the movies she saw, how she felt about the war in Vietnam or the hippie movement or her second-rate (for her) performance at Woodstock. She is, of course, a tragic figure in popular music, but fleshing out that figure--giving us some surprising, intimate insights into her quirky personality--has yet to be achieved. **1/2 from ****

Janis Joplin was sadly one of many rock stars to die young after overdosing on drugs. Unfortunately, this documentary is rather short on insight into who she was and why her life turned out the way it did. We're told she had a tough childhood, and then quickly, we're told how as a very young woman she ran away to San Francisco, became a singer and an addict, and nearly died. Yet all this is covered in just fifteen minutes; her career once famous fills out the rest of the programme, yet it might seem arguable that in a sense, the most important things in her life had already taken place before this began. There's also little discussion of her musical abilities; a lot about her personality and how she gave herself to her singing, but if her music doesn't move you, there's not a lot of dispassionate explanation here. A string of talking heads tell us how extraordinary, how full-of-life Janis was; but having watched them all, I still didn't feel like I knew her at all.