GamerTab That was an excellent one.

VividSimon Simply Perfect

Onlinewsma Absolutely Brilliant!

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

TheExpatriate700 This film is an excellent collage of musical performances and interviews with Janis Joplin. It gives a true sense of her power as a performer, featuring clips of her most famous performances. The Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock, and various television performances are all here. For fans who want to revisit the past or people just being introduced to Janis, this is the perfect place to start your musical journey.At the same time, Janis features lots of excellent interviews and behind the scenes footage, ranging from appearances on the Dick Cavett Show to film of her recording songs with her band. By including these clips, the film gives us a better sense of who Joplin actually was.The film leaves out any discussion of how Joplin died, which is for the better. Rather than focusing on morbid gossip, the film celebrates her life, which in the end is why she is really remembered.

runamokprods Amazing live performances captured on film are the reason to see to see this. The interviews with Janis don't reveal much, and there's no real sense of her history.Even the stage stuff is shot pretty straightforwardly, but, man-o-man could she sing! One wonderful thing is that a lot of the numbers are uncut, allowed to go their full length, which, with Janis in concert, could easily be 8 minutes or more. The power, the emotion, the energy, the sexiness, the sweet sense of fun she brought to the stage could only be hinted at on her albums. For those reasons it's more than worth sitting through the slightly homogenized off-stage material.

John Seal Though I am not a fan of the music of Janis Joplin, I found this to be a refreshing look at the brief life and times of the Texas-born wailer. Completely lacking in artifice, Joplin comes across as the archetypal high school outcast, a frumpy artistic type who found liberation living the life of a San Francisco hippy and singing the blues. Joplin comes across as extremely likable and is bluntly honest about her shortcomings as a singer: she pays tribute to Aretha Franklin, acknowledging her own lack of subtlety which, she hoped wistfully, might come in time. That time, of course, never came, and we are left with the extremely erratic results. Joplin is best remembered for her decent if clumsy takes on Ball and Chain and Piece of My Heart, and those tracks are represented here, but the versions of Tell Mama, Cry Baby, and Maybe are frankly embarrassing. Joplin also struggles with Gershwin's Summertime, but the results there are better, partly because the song is so mighty it defies all attempts to lessen its power, and partly because the Kozmic Blues Band wisely chose to arrange it in a raga rock style which still sounds quite fresh today. The film ends with a wistful photo montage set to the tune of Me and Bobby McGee, the posthumous 1971 hit that reunited Janis with the country music of her childhood. Regardless of how you rate Joplin's music, I defy anyone to watch this film and not come away deeply impressed by the humor, intelligence, and warmth of its subject.

Dunhill This is one of the best movies I have ever seen. It documents Janis Joplin with her 3 bands: Big Brother and the Holding Company, Kosmic Blues Band, and the Full Tilt Boogie Band. It is a collection of her best songs, Ball & Chain (1969), Piece of My Heart (1969), and Maybe (1969, also). I personally think that the Kosmic Blues Band is the best, especially their rendition of "Summertime". This is a must-see for fans of Pearl.