Billie

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.

It's a documentary on the singer Billie Holiday based on research and oral interviews by Linda Lipnack Kuehl, who died in 1978 under mysterious circumstances, which meant she could not finish the book she was writing about Holiday.

I watched this movie because I was very disappointed when I watched "Lady Sings the Blues" (1972) starring Diana Ross playing Billie Holiday. The story told in that movie seemed to have a passing connection to reality, and much of it was pretty bad despite the praise Ross received for playing the role. Ross did not have the depth to play such a complex person.

This 90-minute documentary makes excellent use of Kuehl's audio interviews of musicians that worked with Holiday, friends from her early life, and people like one of the pimps from her early life as a prostitute. It was chilling to hear him laugh about prostitutes liking to be beaten up. Accompanying the interviews is a lot of Holiday music and film footage that matches well the interviews. The most striking musical piece for me was "Strange Fruit," which explicitly references victims of lynching as the "strange fruit."

In my mind, if you want to learn about the real Billie Holiday, this is the film to see.

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.

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.

Before seeing this documentary I knew little about Billie Holiday. She had a rough start in Philadelphia and Baltimore, including being sex trafficked by her prostitute mother. But she had a mesmerizing voice, while she could probably sing anything well she preformed more as a vocal stylist. And many of her songs were reflections of herself and her life. The documentary contains many vocal excerpts from interviews, including some by Holiday herself.

In many respects her life was mostly a tragedy, heavy into sex, drugs, and alcohol into her adulthood which ended when she was only 44. But she did have an indelible influence on her type of music.

On DVD from my public library, I watched it at home, my wife skipped.