Billie

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.

I don't know why so many here are mad that the film talked about Linda. I also don't know anybody needed this film to understand Billie's music. This film is about these amazing interviews that Linda took years to get, and in the process, probably died for them. Without Linda's obsession, there would be no film. I am just so grateful that she did this before all these people who personally knew Billie died. And it sounded like many of these folks were glad to have their voices heard to set the record straight. Linda instinctively understood the cultural importance of these accounts from the very mouths of people who had to endure Jim Crow crap with Billie. I loved the weaving of Billie's radio interview and her London TV appearences throughout. I also loved the amount of time this spent on her childhood, and her relationship with the songs Strange Fruit and Don't Explain.

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.

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.