Cast: Henry Goodman, Edward Hibbert, Imelda Staunton, Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Paul Dano, Kelli Garner, Clark Middleton, Bette Henritze, Sondra James, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Christina Kirk, Gail Martino, Lee Wong, Adam LeFevre, Eugene Levy, Andy Prosky,
Plot: Set in 1969, the film follows the true story of Elliot Tiber, an aspiring Greenwich Village interior designer whose parents own the small dilapidated El Monaco Motel in White Lake, in the town of Bethel, New York. The hippie theater troupe The Earthlight Players rents the barn, but can hardly pay any rent. They sometimes run around naked outside, but are then chased back into the barn by Elliot’s mother. Due to supposed financial trouble the motel may have to be closed, but Elliot assists in trying to avoid that.Elliot plans to hold a small musical festival, and has, for one dollar, obtained a permit from the town of Bethel. When he hears that the organizers of the Woodstock Festival face opposition against the originally planned location, he offers his permit and the motel accommodations. Max Yasgur provides his nearby farm land; first they agree on a fee of $ 5,000, but after realizing how many people will come Yasgur demands $75,000, which the organizers reluctantly accept. Elliot comes to agreement about the fee for the motel more smoothly. Initial objections by his mother quickly disappear when she sees the cash paid in advance. A veteran transvestite is hired as security guard.Elliot and Yasgur encounter a little bit of expected opposition. The local diner refuses to serve Elliot anymore, inspectors target the hotel (and only his) for building code violations, and some local boys paint a swastika and hate words on the hotel. However, these things are quickly squelched, and Yasgur doesn’t care because he’s gotten more politeness from everybody that came then he ever got from the locals who oppose it.The Tiber family works hard and makes much money. Elliot and the viewer do not see the musical performances; on his way to them Elliot makes an LSD-trip with a couple, in their Volkswagen Bus.When back Elliot suggests to his mother that they have now money to hire a worker, so that he can leave, but his greedy mother prefers Elliot’s free services. However, it turns out that Elliot’s mother secretly (without even her husband knowing) saved $ 97,000, so that even before the festival they were financially fine. Elliot hates it that his mother pretended financial trouble and requested him to help out. With his father’s blessing he leaves to live his own life. Trailer:
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Taking Woodstock comments / review
Date: 2009-12-17 22:21:15
User: Buy Truy
Don’t be misled by the title of Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock.” This likable, humane movie is not an attempt to recreate the epochal Woodstock Music and Art Fair captured in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary “Woodstock.” It is essentially a small, intimate film into which is fitted a peripheral view of the landmark event that took place on Aug. 15 through 18, 1969, on a dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y., and has since been exalted ad nauseam for its good vibes.
Most of the concert takes place out of sight of the camera. The movie’s primary focus is El Monaco, a shabby Catskills motel in White Lake, N.Y., not far from the site on which 32 acts, including Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Who and Jimi Hendrix, made rock music history.
The little bit of the concert that is shown is a glowing, golden circle glimpsed in the far distance amid a throbbing acid haze outside the van of a gentle hippie couple. The music heard during the trip scene, “The Red Telephone” by the Los Angeles band Love, emanates not from the stage but from speakers inside the van, where the couple initiates a shy young stranger into the mysteries of LSD.
Like Mr. Lee’s 1999 Civil War drama, “Ride With the Devil,” which was set on the war’s western fringe, “Taking Woodstock” operates on the principle that contemplation of historic events from the margins can be more revealing than from the hot center. Although it shows an immense traffic jam, fields littered with trash and hippies gleefully sliding through mud, “Taking Woodstock” pointedly shies away from spectacle, the better to focus on how the lives of individuals caught up by history are transformed. Structurally, the film resembles the event it remembers. The screenplay by Mr. Lee’s longtime collaborator James Schamus (he also wrote the script for “Ride With the Devil”) is open-ended and episodic. No one predicted the scale of the horde, estimated at half a million, that would descend on Bethel with limited supplies of food and water in unsettled weather. Any number of disasters could have turned what was billed as “An Aquarian Exposition” promising “3 Days of Peace & Music” into a massive bummer.
The main character, Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), from whose memoir, “Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life” (written with Tom Monte) the film was adapted, is a mild-mannered, semicloseted gay interior decorator who has been living in Greenwich Village. As played by Mr. Martin, he suggests an earnest, sad-sack cousin of Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock in “The Graduate.” For all its believability, Mr. Martin’s performance lacks the star magnetism that emanated from Mr. Hoffman playing an even more reticent character.
Elliot has returned to the Catskills to help his parents, Jake (Henry Goodman) and Sonia (Imelda Staunton), Jews who immigrated from Russia, keep afloat their financially failing motel. As the head of Bethel’s Chamber of Commerce, Elliot offers the motel as a home base for the promoters of Woodstock Ventures after the company loses its permit for an arts festival in the nearby town of Wallkill.
He also smoothes the way for Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), the dairy farm’s owner, and Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff), the festival’s prime mover, to make a deal. Mr. Groff’s Lang is presented as a suave hippie capitalist with a streak of grandiosity; he appears, knightlike, atop a horse near the end of the movie.
“Taking Woodstock” is a gentle, meandering celebration of personal liberation at a moment when rigid social barriers were becoming more permeable, at least among the young. Elliot and his parents lead the list of those experiencing pangs of enlightenment amid the hippie swarm.
In a relationship that is made much more emphatically in Mr. Tiber’s memoir, the movie explicitly connects Woodstock to the gay-liberation movement and the Stonewall riots, which took place two months earlier that summer. A friend of Elliot’s even brings to the motel a record by Judy Garland, who had died a few days before the Stonewall uprising; some have theorized that grief over her death was a precipitating factor in the riots.
During his LSD initiation by the hippie couple, Elliot is cuddled and caressed by both the girl and the boy. The trip sequence is one of the most benign to be shown in any movie peddling period psychedelia. Elliot also takes inspiration from Vilma (Liev Schreiber), a ferociously masculine, kindhearted, cross-dressing Marine who appears at the motel and provides its security.
In their own moment of enlightenment, Jake and the grim, penny-pinching Sonia surrender their inhibitions after ingesting some hash brownies and suffer a major case of the giggles. The healing also extends to Elliot’s high school friend Billy (Emile Hirsch), a paranoid Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The film’s wittiest nostalgic current is the presence of the Earthlight Players (who really existed), a visiting avant-garde theater troupe whose members use any excuse to disrobe collectively. The movie’s laugh-out-loud moment is their unrecognizable staging of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” as a nude “happening,” in which they confront the audience and denounce “indecent legions of decency, fascist pornographers and racist warmongers.”
For all its sincerity, “Taking Woodstock” lacks the passion of Mr. Lee’s finest films, “Brokeback Mountain,” “Lust, Caution,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “The Ice Storm.” I would add, however, that given a subject that has become synonymous with overblown mythmaking, its modesty becomes it.
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