Taking Woodstock is enormous fun.
Taking Woodstock (2009)
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Reviews Counted:165
Fresh:81
Rotten:84
Average Rating:5.5/10
Consensus: Featuring numerous 60s-era clichés, but little of the musical magic that highlighted the famous festival, Taking Woodstock is a breezy but underwhelming portrayal.
Rated: R [See Full Rating] for graphic nudity, some sexual content, drug use and language.
Runtime: 1 hr 50 mins
Genre: Comedies
Theatrical Release:Aug 28, 2009 Wide
Box Office: $7,366,736
Synopsis:
A generation began in his backyard. From Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), comes Taking Woodstock, a new comedy inspired by the true...
A generation began in his backyard. From Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), comes Taking Woodstock, a new comedy inspired by the true story of Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin) and his family, who inadvertently played a pivotal role in making the famed Woodstock Music and Arts Festival into the happening that it was.
It's 1969, and Elliot Tiber, a down-on-his-luck interior designer in Greenwich Village, New York, has to move back upstate to help his parents run their dilapidated Catskills motel, The El Monaco. The bank's about to foreclose; his father wants to burn the place down, but hasn't paid the insurance; and Elliot is still figuring how to come out to his parents.
When Elliot hears that a neighboring town has pulled the permit on a hippie music festival, he calls the producers, thinking he could drum up some much-needed business for the motel. Three weeks later, half a million people are on their way to his neighbor's farm in White Lake, NY, and Elliot finds himself swept up in a generation-defining experience that would change his life, and American culture, forever. --© Focus Features
Starring: Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Liev Schreiber, Imelda Staunton
Starring: Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Liev Schreiber, Imelda Staunton, Eugene Levy, Dan Fogler, Jeffrey Dean Morgan
Director: Ang Lee
Director: Ang Lee
Screenwriter: James Schamus
Producer: James Schamus, Ang Lee, Celia Costas
Composer: Danny Elfman
Studio: Focus Features
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Reviews for Taking Woodstock
Aside from a few electric moments this is mostly a slow-moving, flat and unimpressive film.
This Borsht Belt turned Bacchanalian screen memoir suffers from persistent peripheral vision of a historic moment, while dulling the senses with an overload of housekeeping details. Not exactly a bad trip, but in no way a time travel contact high.
It seems that Lee and Schamus had no idea what it was they wanted to say here. Did Woodstock matter? Does anyone care?
Though intermittently amusing and exhilarating, Taking Woodstock can't quite pull together its threads into one totally trippy tapestry.
a limp attempt to stage a story around the most historic concert ever and then treat the concert as a background echo to the predictable melodrama on center stage.
Dear-hearted but fuzzy in a way that unintentional mirrors the hippie aesthetic of the Woodstock festival, Lee's film is interested not so much in the massive concert as in the Catskill Mountains community which hosted it, however unwillingly.
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.
So easy to get behind thematically and one with fascinating subject matter, but it's a movie that never gets over some of the stereotypes of its subject matter to present a fully-formed, relatable, human drama.
This is very light material, and, unusually for a Lee picture, not everybody in the ensemble appears to be acting in the same universe, let alone the same story. On the other hand: It’s fun.
Taking Woodstock has the appeal of an inside story told from an especially good angle. But beyond that, the movie is a celebration of the way this event has gone into memory and of the meaning it has acquired.
It's great that Taking Woodstock doesn't trample on anything sacred, but it also never arrives anywhere interesting.
Taking Woodstock doesn't show anyone performing at the 1969 concert event, an intriguing choice that also works as a metaphor for the woebegone film. It never gets where it's going, either.
Lee's first total miscalculation, his first wholly inessential film.
Can you dig it? Maybe, if you aren't already up to your tie-dyed shorts in Woodstock memories, and if you can accept that there's relatively little music in this happy-go-lucky movie about history's most celebrated music festival.
For any teenager tempted to sneer at Mom and Dad’s veneration of the whole Woodstock thing, this film explains why those three days in 1969 had such a profound effect on a generation.
Latest News for Taking Woodstock
November 13, 2009:
James Schamus talks Taking Woodstock - RT Interview
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