Taking Woodstock

Directed by Ang Lee

(R)

**

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One man’s memory of the fabled rock festival

Taking Woodstock is “one boring trip, man,” said Joanne Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal. In his adaptation of Elliot Tiber’s memoir, director Ang Lee tries to recapture what went down during those three days in upstate New York in 1969. Hoping to save his family’s struggling hotel, Tiber (Demetri Martin) asks his neighbor Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy) to host the festival on his farm. The rest is history, though Lee’s “gentle, ambling” film mostly fails to capture the significance of this legendary event. He turns America’s ultimate moment of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll into “an exceedingly lame, heavily clichéd, thumb-sucking bore,” said Lou Lumenick in the New York Post. The music is an afterthought, the sex basically nonexistent, and the drugs only surface during a tritely portrayed acid trip. Woodstock wasn’t about sex and drugs, said Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was about peace and love—and so is Taking Woodstock. Lee’s created a coming-of-age tale that’s also about recapturing innocence, and his film captures like few others­ the feeling of youth—“of moving through a golden moment and knowing it.”