The United States vs Billie Holiday Costumes Honor History With Contemporary Prada yahoo.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yahoo.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs written by
Johann Hari. You can read the excerpt detailing The Hunting of Billie Holiday on Politico. It was adapted for the screen by Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, so it should come to no surprise that the film has a lot of long, conversational, theatrical scenes.
Besides Day as Holiday, the characters in the film based on real people primarily include the antagonist Henry Anslinger, played by Garrett Hedlund, the United States first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the DEA. In Hari s book, he talks about how Anslinger treated Judy Garland s drug addiction with compassion, calling her “a beautiful, gracious lady,” rather than having her arrested and hounded by cops and federal agents. Holiday was obviously treated much differently.
Two new movies emphasize the singer’s spirit of defiance and political courage.
TAKASHI SEIDA/HULU
Andra Day as Billie Holiday in her dressing room in Lee Daniels’s movie “The United States vs. Billie Holiday”
Is any genre more vulnerable to the vagaries of ideology than the lavish artist biopic? The essential dilemma is how to milk the life for drama while also accommodating what was singular enough to merit biopic treatment in the first place: the work. Being juicier, the life tends to take over, rendering the art some half-accidental outcropping of painful experience. And a life story invites a moral looking at someone else’s from beginning to end, you can’t help but see how it might have gone better.