Salon.com > Taking Woodstock

Peace, love and sexual awakening

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:16:00 +0000

Ang Lee's "Taking Woodstock" is a gentle film that tells the story of how one Elliot Tiber -- born Elliot Teichberg -- helped a group of ambitious festival organizers find a site for their concert and a place in history. It's a nice little story, all right. But "Taking Woodstock" is so gentle it barely has enough vitality to stick to the screen. It's harmless enough as a snapshot of a young man's awakening to the grand possibilities of adult life, but not particularly effective at capturing the spirit, the thrill or even the mud of this culturally monumental event.

Of course, if that's what you're after, Michael Wadleigh's 1970 documentary "Woodstock" is the place to go. Lee seems to know he can't compete with it, so he doesn't try (although he does borrow some of its key elements, particularly Wadleigh's use of split-screen effects). Yet his low-key, free-spirited approach feels dispassionate and disconnected. The movie's uncharismatic center is Elliot (Demetri Martin), who's already left his parents' home in the Catskills to avail himself of the freedom and excitement of Greenwich Village. Or, rather, he has almost left home: He's called back one summer to help save the family business, a decidedly unglamorous "resort" -- in other words, motel -- that his parents, Jake and Sonia (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton), have allowed to fall into disrepair over the years. Facing several months, perhaps even a lifetime, of stifling boredom, even as he's striving to put his family's finances in order, Elliot finds a welcome window of opportunity when he learns that the promoters of an upcoming music and arts festival, scheduled to be held in nearby Wallkill, New York, have lost their permit for the event. He calls its producer, Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff), to offer his family's motel as a base for his staff. He also introduces Lang and his groovy colleagues to a nearby dairy farmer, Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy, in a characteristically deadpan, and wonderful, performance), who meets with the kids, deems them A-OK, and agrees to let them use his land for their show -- provided they clean up after themselves and, of course, pay a small fee (which he later increases).

Woodstock never dies

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:18:00 +0000

Forty years ago this weekend, over 500,000 people descended upon Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, N.Y., for a three-day music festival. Miles of ink have been spilled in the years since then mythologizing the mud, the bad acid trips and the music, and creating something fresh out of this cultural legend is not an easy task -- even for an Academy Award-winning filmmaker like Barbara Kopple.

Nevertheless, this week VH1 is airing Kopple's new documentary, "Woodstock: Now & Then" (premieres Friday, Aug. 14, at 9 p.m. on VH1 and VH1 Classic, and Monday, Aug. 17, at 8 p.m. on the History Channel), a historical portrait of the festival interwoven with a look at its impact on young musicians today.

For the “Now” portion of the movie, Kopple focuses on a group of young musicians from Paul Green's School of Rock. Their musical skills are impressive, and their nerdy knowledge of Janis Joplin and Keith Moon suggests that Woodstock’s legacy stretches beyond aging hippies.

Cannes roundup: Lars von Trier and Jane Campion … they’re ba-a-ack!

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:36:00 +0000

Courtesy Cannes Film Festival

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in "Antichrist."

Ah, Cannes! After a rainy weekend, the sun came out over the Boulevard de la Croisette. Monday's temperature hit the mid 70s, and all the horrible and beautiful people in town for the film world's biggest event hit the beachfront restaurants and hotel bars.

Or so I gather. The weather report comes from the Internet, the horrible people is an educated guess, and I'm writing not from the Festival de Cannes press room, with its ocean view and its phalanx of alienated, short-shorts-clad baristas staring resentfully into the middle distance, but from central New York state, where the so-called spring feels more like late November and Monday's temperature barely cracked 50. In a season of global economic meltdown and the disintegration of journalism as a viable business model, it seemed the teensiest bit extravagant for Salon to send me to the south of France for two weeks of sleepless movie-watching and partygoing. I mean, yes, it was extravagant in the best of times. More to the point, it seemed foolish for me to try and insist on it this year.

“Woodstock”

Thu, 26 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000

"Woodstock: The Director's Cut"
Directed by Michael Wadleigh
Starring the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Santana, Sly Stone, many others
Warner Home Video; widescreen; aspect ratio varies from 1.33:1 to 2.36:1
Extras: Eight new scenes and performances

"Woodstock" the movie is, of course, a piece of propaganda for itself: Like "Triumph of the Will," its maker sees in its large assemblages of people, in their totems and rituals, a significance possibly out of proportion to their actual political or social meaning. Director Michael Wadleigh and his team (including, most notably, Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker) flood the screen with images, using double and triple split screens, irresistible music and almost hallucinogenic crowd scenes to limn a convincing portrait of ecstatic chaos.

Given the continuing resonance of the title word and the film's entirely unexpected reportorial rigor, one can make the argument that "Woodstock" flirts with the realm of great documentary art. In the end it is hard to come away not overwhelmed by both the events it pictures and the titanic filmmaking that brings it to the screen.

“Jimi Hendrix Live at Woodstock”

Wed, 12 Jul 2000 19:00:00 +0000

"Jimi Hendrix Live at Woodstock"
Edited by Chris Hegedus and Erez Laufer
MCA; full frame
Extras: None

As incredible a document as it is, Michael Wadleigh's three-hour epic "Woodstock" contains too much of some bad things (a little of that Ten Years After goes a long way) and not enough of some very good things. "Jimi Hendrix Live at Woodstock," consisting of footage shot by Wadleigh's team at the festival, much of it not shown in "Woodstock" and not previously available, goes a long way toward redressing one of those wrongs. The 57 minutes of performances -- in which Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies (making their debut) appear so relaxed and loose you can almost forget they're playing to a small city's worth of people -- is mesmerizing for guitar wankers and Hendrix nerds alike.

Joni Mitchell

Tue, 04 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

A somber mood prevailed over Britain's Isle of Wight festival in 1970. The
four-day concert, subject of the 1997 documentary "Message to Love,"
showcased the Who, Jimi Hendrix (in his last performance) and the Doors, but
the dominant themes seemed to be exploitation and narcissism. Kris
Kristofferson took note of the surly, 600,000-strong crowd -- "I think
they're gonna shoot us" -- and hightailed it offstage shortly before reaching
the end of "Me and Bobby McGee." The festival became a dark antithesis to
the hippie Utopia projected by Woodstock.

Stepping into this miasma of greed and paranoia, Joni Mitchell performed her
song "Woodstock" in a lilting, melancholy soprano that seemed to float
somewhere above her piano, as beautifully incongruous as a seagull hovering
over a landfill. But after the song, a whacked-out man named Yogi Joe
grabbed the microphone and began shouting. After he "was thrown off the stage by her security, much to her
dismay," documentary director Murray Lerner recalls on the recently released
DVD, "the crowd began to boo and become unruly." Yogi Joe spouted off
backstage about being the "head of the official committee to paint the fence
invisible," but Mitchell had the unenviable task of quieting the belligerent
throng. As she later told British music magazine Q:

Sharps & flats

Thu, 21 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

It's hard to imagine a music festival ending in anything but a fiery riot when its postprandial two-CD companion set begins with Korn and ends with Bruce Hornsby. There's one group summoning a thousands-strong sing-along to the less than affirming words, "What if I should die!?" And then there's a curly-haired square best known for his musical invitation to "listen to the mandolin rain." Forget about Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst's needling fans at Woodstock 99 to "smash stuff"; the presence of the offensively bland Bruce Hornsby is probably as much to blame for the festival's incendiary send-off. Though the "Woodstock 99" collection's opening and closing tracks don't coordinate with the festival's schedule, they serve as bookend reminders that certain things are to be expected when hydrogen mingles with an open flame.

A bold line separates the two disks of "Woodstock 99." Maybe with a cheeky nod to the Beatles' hits collections, they are referred to as the "Red Album" (for our purposes, the flame) and the "Blue Album" (as suitable a color for hydrogen as any). As postcards from the land of ceaseless sweat and $4 water, they deliver disparate messages: One says something along the lines of "Fuck you! And you, too!"; the other, "Honey, I've met some of the most interesting people here."

The not-a-biography of Richie Havens

Mon, 13 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Richie Havens grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father was Native American, his mother from the Caribbean. He hung out in Greenwich Village in the '50s and '60s, made a few records, then appeared at Woodstock, where he sang "Freedom." Over the years, on the basis of this and the classic Woodstock documentary, Havens has managed to stay in the public eye. "They Can't Hide Us Anymore" is apparently another in a long list of credits designed to boost his image.

His philosophy, which he goes into at some length, is what you might call "standard deviation." Smoking grass is OK, using heroin is not. The American police are generally a bad lot, and the police where he grew up in the slums of Brooklyn were awful, but the soldiers at Woodstock who brought in (and took out) the performers in their helicopters were wonderful.

Southern Blacks have been mistreated over the years, War is Bad, and the War in Vietnam was Very Very Bad. Whales and porpoises are good, the environment needs to be protected and autistic kids know more than you think they do. And Havens has to be grateful for all the nice things that have happened to him - like making a living off music, making the records he wants to and meeting John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Nina Simone, among others.

What a riot

Tue, 27 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

8 p.m. Friday

The main stage at Woodstock 99 in Rome, N.Y., looks like something between a pop art rainbow and a massive arts and crafts quonset hut. The stage is at the far west end of the sprawling festival site, a former air base with military industrial charm, located 100 miles away from the farm where the most famous festival in music history took place 30 years ago. The sun is starting to drop, and the crowd, supposedly numbering around 200,000 looks pretty bad. They've paid $150 per ticket, weathered the first day's heat, escaped mud slingers and now have to clear trash just to sit down on the matted grass or hot concrete. There are three nights in front of them, and those who stick around through Sunday night will witness -- or maybe even participate in -- something resembling a riot.

The stage is flanked by two camera platforms on each side and a huge light tower smack dab in the center, blocking out any unimpeded long-distance views and forcing anyone beyond the tower to watch one of two Jumbotron video screens. A gully runs perpendicular to the stage, back about 400 yards or so, with sets of speakers on the right and left.