When you’re living with the repercussions of baby boomer excess,
it’s pretty hard to get excited for their halcyon nostalgia, which
makes Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock hard to connect to in a
meaningful way. If you are about to shoulder a generation’s enormous
health care costs as they wither, do you really want to revel in their
lost hippie idyll too? The film follows Elliot Teichberg as he welcomes
the concert promoters to his parents’ failing Catskills motel and into
his community. Demetri Martin as Elliot—cutie-pie though he
is—doesn’t have the chops to convey the multiple pressures on a man
who just wants to make everyone happy to the detriment of his own
desires. Martin plays both Elliot’s repressed sense of fun and his
eventual awakening in a kind of overwhelmed monotone.
Not to be confused with the 1999 Woodstock with Kid Rock
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2009.
It appears the reviewer (Hillary Titley) for “Taking Woodstock” does not get the film at all. The review is overly judgemental with no awarness or appreciation of the essence or era of Woodstock or the consequences of war/racial-human rights issues.
I have two comments on this review. First, it is hard to take Ms. Titley seriously when her writing is so awful. Second, according to this review I should be shunning everything to do with baby boomer culture. So I guess I can’t listen to the Beatles without feeling bitter towards their generation? This tells me nothing about the movie only that Ms. Titley is a bitter “academic” with poor sentence structure.
I dunno, I liked it. There is nothing that bores me more than old people nattering on about the glory days of Woodstock, but as told from this perspective I found it way more compelling.
Mole Rat – – yes an interesting production perspective but are you a little envious perhaps of that era?
You guys are misreading the review. Hillary isn’t telling you to shun the baby boomers. I think a lot of people are tired of movies painting this era with such a rosy lens—which Taking Woodstock definitely does (literally—the entire movie is lit and shot in a woozy, sunny haze.) There have been enough movies like this over recent years—it’s perfectly valid for Hillary to question why another one needs to be made. And I agree with her assessment that this one certainly isn’t memorable enough to warrant its own existence. It just seems kind of indulgent and doesn’t say anything new about the festival or its historic significance.
And there is no music.
The majority of the reviews I’ve read have echoed this critical reaction. I’ve not seen it myself so I can’t say for sure – from what I’ve heard it does sound like an interesting premise.
GG – hell no.
Lang ~ where were you in the 1960’s and for that matter the past 40 odd years?
It appears you and Hillary have ‘missed the boat’ on the film, era and post era.
Rose tinted glasses Not ! — try viewing “Born on the 4th of July”, “Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now”, to name a few films and then we can talk about the fluffy statment of living with the so-named repercussions of the Baby Boomers excess.
The statment regarding the enoromous health care costs situation sounds like a cop-out for not getting the essence of the film or era.