Billie

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.

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.

Billie Holiday was supremely talented, lived a hard life, and had an unstable personality. She died from abuse of drink and drugs, aged just 44. This documentary is interesting as it contains candid interviews from those who knew her, conducted by a female journalist who was researching her life in the 1970s; her work never reached fruition as she died young herself, in what some of those close to her believe to have been suspicious circumstances. We don't really get any insight into the latter death; we do get a more interesting (though unpolished) insight into the singer's life, unfiltered by the hagiography that can spoil some films made too many years after the fact. The speed of Holiday's decline is tragic; it's clear she had problems of her own, but also that those around her (and the racist world she lived in) certainly made them worse. But the film does do justice to her brilliance; to this day, she pretty much defines what a jazz singer is, and she dared to call out racism too. It's definitely worth watching, even if jazz isn't your usual beat.

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.

Refreshingly direct and to the point, this documentary doesn't mince any words and pulls no punches. It's Billie's story right in your face and told by many who really knew her and who had no interest in propagating fantasy versions of Lady Day. The attention paid to the woman who did all the hard work to get these stories told is in no way disproportionate and we owe her a debt of gratitude. Respect!