Johnny Depp has been good to me. I realize that this sounds like an exaggerated form of name-dropping, but I should state that simple fact at some point, and I guess this is that point. I'm not sure when it dawned on me that he wasn't just being his charming self--which everyone will tell you is his standard demeanor to all--but he was serious about...More
With the opening of TAKING WOODSTOCK, there has been a huge nostalgic look back at the iconic event in 1969. For a while there, I was rather depressed about it because the evaluations were so positive, and all intelligent people know that you only matter if you're attacked by the insecure and the jealous. Being ignored or praised is sort of beige.
Nobody attacks people or things that don't matter. Why would they? Anything that matters unnerves the nervous, irritates the irritable, and drives those who don't matter slightly insane. So, articles about how Woodstock's legacy is alive in the music of today, or pleasant walks don't memory lane worried me. Then the people without anything meaningful to do with their time but try to cut down what matters got out their mostly anonymous axes. That was more like it. Shut up, they moaned. We've heard about you and your time all of our lives; we hate it; we hate you. You don't matter! Cool. We baby boomers still rule. The world still spins as it should. Wail on... So, it goes without saying (by me, but it would be great if it grates enough to generate some vitriol) that it was an unique time in world history. Let me tell you what it was like in the summer of the appropriately numbered '69. First, you don't know. You can't. You think we're sex-dominated now? You couldn't handle 1969. Birth control had become widespread by that time, and there were NO--that's what I said--no sexually transmitted diseases among the college crowd. Yes, decades before, Al Capone died of one; and, I suppose, if you went to prostitutes, you might have gotten something, but why on earth would a college student have needed to go to prostitutes? Half of the people around you were naked half of the time, and nobody gave any thought about WHETHER to have sex or not. Was that good? Actually, it turned out to be boring, ultimately. It turns out that romance, seduction, and a challenge are all more interesting. Still, that's the way it was in the summer of '69. What else? I got sex out of the way first so we could concentrate on more substantive things: You have to understand that we were the generation of plenty. Our parents had worked hard, survived a depression before a world war, won that, and survived a recession after it. They saved and sacrificed so we wouldn't have to do that. They were amazing. Naturally, almost none of us appreciated it. There were a lot of us. That's why we're baby BOOMERS after all. Our numbers made us powerful; our easy life gave us time to use those numbers to demand some changes in what we took to be a repressive society (to say we overdid that point is like saying that the current batch of high school students is ill-educated). Some of what we pushed and shoved and shouted and marched and agitated for was good: civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, the environment, social justice for the poor, and an end to war without question. Yes, the music wasn't bad, either--much of it. The sex thing turned out to be a mistake, I think. It certainly made the advance of very bad diseases, including the cruelest one of all, spread faster and more easily--until fear ended all of that. We also were idiots with our attitude about not trusting anyone over thirty. That's agism and just as bigoted as any other group prejudice. And, let's face it: we were and are arrogant. I've been making that point quite intentionally from the start of this entry. I suspect you got that if you've read this far. That demonstrates that you are not one of the short attention span crowd. So, having said all of that, how well does Ang Lee's film recreate the tone and the attitude of the time as it tells the story OUTSIDE of the famous fence at Woodstock? It's eerie in its exactitude in one way above all others, and you can see it: look at the eyes of the people who attended the festival; you will see a look that you can't see any more and I doubt anyone saw before that time. We used the word mellow a lot and it's natural to think of that in connection with drug use (that was rampant and another mistake) but it was also in straight eyes then, and it signified a lack of tension, cynicism, or exploitation. Ang Lee nailed that. Woodstock was just a symbol. I wasn't there, but I was a senior in college, and you have...NO idea...nor will it ever come again. You can find more about films and their makers by going to http://www.whyy.org/flicks and you can follow Patrick Stoner on Twitter. |
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