Janis: Little Girl Blue (2015)

You won't be disappointed!

Just perfect...

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

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.

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.

As an avid Janis Joplin Fan I really wanted to see this Documentary.However with only 1 theater showing it within a 30 mile radius of my home how do they expect this film to do well? Moreover there is only 7 showings a day. I do not live in a remote part of the United States. So why is it there is only 1 theater in New York showing it? Seems the producers of the film have doomed it to failure before it was ever released. I hope it gets released on Blu Ray as it appears that is the only way I will get to see it. Disappointed Fan!

Viewed at 2015 Venice Film Festival., "Janis, Little Girl Blue" by Amy Berg, With Alex Gibney, himself an outstanding documentarian acting as producer, is a Great Doc about a great American singer, Janis Joplin, who died too young on the verge of salvation. Interviews with parents, sister, brother, surviving members of The Grateful Dead, Kris Kristofferson, and most surprising, Dick Cavett (1970). In a year of many good documentaries, this was the best of all -- a marvelous reconstruction of a tragic young life. Janis sang the blues with such conviction and such black feeling that even afro-Americans though she was black -- She died on October 4, 1970 in a Hollywood motel of an accidental heroin overdose at age 27 -- only two weeks after another rock legend, Jimi Hendrix, also at age 27. The film traces her life from humble origins in the nondescript north Texas town of Port Arthur, constant humiliation by her schoolmates because of her extreme nonconformity and relatively plain looks, up through her rise to prominence as the lead singer of the acid/rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company --one of the leading San Francisco rock groups of the mid sixties -- reaching the pinnacle when recognized as the top white blues singer of the age, her difficulties dealing with fame, her loneliness in the midst of adoring crowds, her battle with drug addiction, and finally her tragic early death on the verge of even wider fame and general acceptance by the serious music world. Needless to say, the film is liberally spiced with clips from her amazing stage appearances, which is an added enrichment, but this is far from a mere excuse to present her songs -- far more a penetrating probe into the life of an extremely complex personality ---a true artist who became the victim of her own profound talent. Myself more or less a product of the psychedelic sixties, I left the vast Venice theater thoroughly emotionally drained and realizing I had just witnessed a remarkable film about a most remarkable life. Alex, Budapest