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Mixed or average reviews - based on 35 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 36 Ratings

  • Starring: Demetri Martin
  • Summary: Working as an interior designer in Greenwich Village, Elliot feels empowered by the gay rights movement. But he is also still staked to the family business - a dumpy Catskills motel called the El Monaco that is being run into the ground by his overbearing parents, Jake and Sonia Teichberg. In the summer of 1969, Elliot has to move back upstate to the El Monaco in order to help save the motel from being taken over by the bank. Upon hearing that a planned music and arts festival has lost its permit from the neighboring town of Wallkill, NY, Elliot calls producer Michael Lang at Woodstock Ventures to offer his family's motel to the promoters and generate some much-needed business. Soon the Woodstock staff is moving into the El Monaco - and half a million people are on their way to Yasgur's farm for "3 days of Peace & Music in White Lake." (Focus Features) Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 17 out of 35
  2. Negative: 1 out of 35
  1. 75
    Taking Woodstock has the freshness of something being created, not remembered.
  2. 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.
  3. Something of a traffic jam--even with his usual restraint, Lee couldn't recount a key moment of the '60s without a blurry parade of personalities--and also lullingly dull.
  4. 38
    Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock achieves an amazing feat: It turns the fabled music festival, a key cultural moment of the late 20th century, into an exceedingly lame, heavily clichéd, thumb-sucking bore.

See all 35 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 10
  2. Negative: 2 out of 10
  1. RobertT
    10
    Incredible directing by Ang Lee. Ang Lee transported us in time, returning us and uncovered our thinly descised, still simmering bitterness, resentment and anger at the fascist, warmongering, fear mongering, capitalist pig establishment (industrial military congressional complex that sacrificed our young men in a totally unnecessary conflict / war (killing fields) where thousands of Americans and Vietnamese were shot, bombed, displaced, wounded and died. Those antiwar kids "stopped the killing", Man, they stopped the killing of people just because their eyes were not round like ours and their ideologies differed from most brainwashed Americans especially, capitalist, "dead jew on a stick worshipping lemmings" wrapped in the American flag and fighting for Jesus. Innocent kids were shot down at Kent State by the establishment forces. Remember Kent State, anyone? Expand
  2. 8
    A wonderful pleasing film in which the reenactment of the event seems so vivid and accurate. It is entertaining and fun. This movie was never supposed to be just about the music. Expand
  3. ChadS
    7
    Music wafts over a lake teeming with skinny-dippers. "Three days of peace and music" is unfolding at Max Yasgur's farm without us; we�39;re not there to see Richie Havens open the festival, or anybody else take the stage, for that matter. That's because Elliott Teichberg(Demitri Martin) is always hanging around his parents, even after he takes his first tab of acid. "Taking Woodstock" will be a bad trip for those of you expecting nostalgia for dummies. Admittedly, there's no vicarious thrill in watching concert planners plan; we want Jimi; we want Janis, or rather, their thoughtful impersonators. The filmmaker acts as if he couldn't secure the rights to the music. The only live music in "Taking Woodstock" is performed by some amateur band at a warm-up concert for the locals. It's worse than watching Gwynneth Paltrow recite Sylvia Plath-like poetry in Christine Jeffs' compromised film(2003's "Sylvia") about the suicidal poetess. We want the real thing(real poetry, real rock lyricism) not some knock-off, as a payoff to all the minutae that went into mounting a large-scale undertaking like Woodstock. Told in the filmic language of Michael Wadleigh's documentary, the split-screen technique unintentionally parodies "Woodstock" instead of paying homage to the 1970 film, because what it documents seems so mundane and uncinematic. To our disappointment, the little people never give way to the stars. "Taking Woodstock" is limited by a protagonist who loves Judy Garland more than Joan Baez. Elliott's indifference to rock and roll forces the filmmaker to create a period piece movie without a glut of corresponding music as shorthand for establishing time and place. There's no Buffalo Springfield at his disposal; he achieves the look and feel of the sixties almost solely through "mis-en-scene", best exemplified in the scene where we see a late-sixties time capsule as shifting panorama, while Elliott is being escorted to the concert by a motorcycle cop. For what it's worth, "Taking Woodstock" succeeds, even though we're mad at Elliott for not getting us anywhere near the stage. Expand
  4. DavidK
    4
    This movie is an unqualified disaster. The script makes no sense. You never care about the main character and his relationship with his parents and Dimitri Martin never conveys anything but a blank look. Compared to the weirdly dramatic emoting of his parents, it is, as one reviewer said, that they are not in the same movie. And in the end, despite Ang Lee's attention to the background details, the scope of the event is never conveyed. The one shot of the mass of people is unconvincing...It needed one large overhead shot or something....anyway, Ang Lee will be great again, but he is not here. Expand

See all 10 User Reviews

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