Billie

I really enjoyed this film - lots of clips of Billie singing that I'd not seen before and many sympathetic interviews with other great musicians. Well worth watching whether you're a fan or new to the music of the woman who pretty much defined popular singing.

Every bit of video or audio of or about Billie is amazing but this docu is so oddly and awkwardly put together with so much focus on this Jewish New Yorker woman who compiled many interviews and meant to write a bio but died before its completion. The amount of screen time spent either on billie's drug use or on this unknown writer woman made for one heck of a disappointing experience. More Billie!!! Not the least bit insightful and this writer's family must've insisted much (MUCH) of the film center on her. Which, when we're talking about Lady Day, is a criminal waste of opportunity. I wdve scored it lower except that I want to encourage more works about Billie Holiday - and if this film gets scored very low that might scare future projects away.

Besides this doc I also just watched the newly released DVD "Sid & Judy" (Garland) both foretelling the enormous pressures of achievement. Money & drugs/alcohol, as usual, play a part. This doc compiles the many years of research from the intelligent, yet sensitive, 125 audio taped interviews of Linda Lipnack Kuehl along with her research into the paper trail documentation of Billie's life. Unfortunately Linda died before she could edit it all into a source story (although many other's have utilized her research) on Billie's life. The saddest part is two years before Billie died (1959 with just $750) she married McKay, and even though she intended to divorce & create a will, it was never completed & her estate went to him & his family.

Note: 1937, Count Basie introduces Billie (age 22) into the band and to the audience with perhaps the first recorded singing rhyming rap lyric. Amazing to hear how current it sounded.

This could've been a good documentary about Billie Holiday. For me, this doc had poor balancing of the elements in a very complicated life. As others have mentioned, I don't know why the life of the interviewer/biographer was enmeshed in a film about Billie. If they want to tell Linda's story, they should make a separate movie about her. This movie gave me a chance to see some video clips of Billie singing that I haven't seen before. There were a few insightful remarks about Billie from some musicians who worked with her. Overall, I don't think justice was done in telling the life story of Billie. She was a unique singer who influenced every other singer in her day. I would've liked the focus of this film to have been on that.

I don't know whether it's interesting or not that this intended writer of a bio on Billie - starting out just because she was a fan - like the rest of us - is white, Jewish woman but the amount of time this docu/biopic spends on the writer, who never completed the work before dying, is ridiculous and uninteresting. Way, Way too much screen time devoted to this other woman's life - which, when you've got footage and interviews of and about LADY DAY BILLIE HOLIDAY - it's mind-boggling to devote so much time on this one woman's attempts to write about Billie. Very odd style and underwhelming - which only left me desperately wanting to see and hear more of Billie and much less of this other distracting stuff. Badly done. R.I.P. TO THE LATE, GREAT BILLIE HOLIDAY.