Taking Woodstock

O.K., let's talk about what I have had the chance to see.

As I mentioned, my new thing is the "Radius Project" of seeing a movie in every cinema within a 100 mile radius of Fort Collins. I got underway at the Boulder Theater, but my next movie, which I saw the first day after arriving back in the Fort, was as close as you could possibly get to my parents' house.

The local Carmike multiplex is literally about a quarter of a mile from where I'm typing this. Last summer (2008, I mean), I would spend my mornings reading in the nearby Barnes and Noble and hit a movie at the Carmike on my way home, walking in the blue sky and heat to the theater, which was nice and cool.

Well, it's not hot anymore. It's cool. In fact, it freaking snowed here last weekend, which is one of the reasons I just decided to stay indoors, getting me further behind on my moviewatching.

But as it happens, I found myself in the Carmike two Thursdays ago to catch Taking Woodstock on it's last day in town. It's the latest from Ang Lee, whom I mostly appreciate as a director, and I thought I'd missed my opportunity to see this. I was delighted to get the chance (sorry, Shorts, you lost again).

Having suffered through a string of less than inspiring flicks lately, I was particularly looking forward to sitting back and enjoying a fun period piece about the 1960's. Did I say "fun"? Oh, sorry I forgot this is Ang Lee. Nothing is ever quite fun.

The 1960's---well that goes without saying. Everything Lee does is about the twisted dysfunction of America in the 1960's. Even the Hulk movie he did was about the 1960's. So that part I expect.

What I didn't expect was to be so damn confused about the thing. By the time the movie was over I felt like I understood as little about the Woodstock Music Festival as when I walked in.

The first surprise was to learn was Lee that essentially Woodstock was "all about the Jews." Until now, I didn't know that the real story of Woodstock was that a family of Jews living in upstate New York, broke and persectuted by the local Christian bigots, are saved when they arrange for a bunch of rich, hip Big City Jews to come and rescue them with a music festival. Funny, all this time, I thought Woodstock was a universal thing. Turns out it was really just a 1960's America version of a Holocaust movie (and certainly we need a lot more of those).

But then just when I was sure it was all about the Jews, the movie sort of moves on to other things, and eventually it becomes a homosexual liberation movie. Turns out one of the main characters is gay. My gaydar must be faulty because I didn't see that coming at all.

Taking Woodstock is confused and not much fun at all. Maybe that's what the original festival was like. I wasn't there. I felt like Lee didn't want to make any bold statements about the festival, but to give us a pastiche, so no one could say, "Hey, man, that's not what it was all about."

Instead I didn't know how I was supposed to feel about it, or any of the characters. I stopped caring about them. We got very little narrative follow-through and connection to most of the charactes we meet. Everytime I thought a subplot was building, it simply didn't go anywhere.

Was I supposed to see the dysfunction of it all? Lee pays lip service to this, with a reference at the end to Altamont. But what the hell was this all about? It felt like a pointless downer, all in all.

There was a Bruno-esque moment when a hippie theater is giving a free performance to the skeptical, bigoted, non-Jewish locals. The hippies strip off their clothes and start mocking the audience for being narrow minded. As in Bruno, I felt like I was the one being yelled at. I didn't like it. But whose side was Lee on? What did this have to do with the story being told? I just didn't get it.

I suppose I'm just too square, too conservative, too much a member of the, uh, older generation. America is just fucked up, you see, and it takes Jews and homosexuals to shove it in our face. Is that was the movie was saying? Sheesh.

So in summary---a rambling narrative that left most of the characters as malformed cardboard. A big disappointment. The best scene in the movie was an imaginative re-creation of an LSD experience by the main character, perhaps the best acid scene I've seen on film. Everything else felt like a bad trip. Get me back on the Thruway...