Taking Woodstock

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 healthcare 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. –Hillary Titley