Taking Woodstock

Name: Taking Woodstock
Genre: Drama, Comedy, Music
Released: August 26, 2009
Duration: 120 min
Rating: 55
Cast: Demetri Martin

2009

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Mixed or average reviews based on 35 Critic Reviews

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Taking Woodstock

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Movie Details & Credits

Focus Features | Release Date: August 26, 2009 | R

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 backWorking 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

Director: Ang Lee

Genre(s): Drama, Comedy, Music

Rating: R

Runtime: 120 min

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Critic Reviews

Roger Ebert

Taking Woodstock has the freshness of something being created, not remembered. Read full review

Carrie Rickey

Lee distills the flavor of this transforming event and hints at how it transformed some who were there. His movie is a contact high. Read full review

Kirk Honeycutt

It's a low-wattage film about a high-wattage event. Which is somewhat disappointing, though you do get a thoughtful, playful, often amusing film about what happened backstage at one of the '60s' great happenings. Read full review

Joe Neumaier

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. Read full review

Todd McCarthy

The picture serves up intermittent pleasures but is too raggedy and laid-back for its own good, its images evaporating nearly as soon as they hit the screen. Read full review

Scott Tobias

Taking Woodstock has a winning generosity of spirit, but even that serves chiefly to underline the film's curious inconsequentiality, as if it were a two-hour pilot for a show about a charmingly eccentric family and a rotating cast of colorful guest stars. Read full review

Lou Lumenick

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. Read full review

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RobertT

Sep 10, 2009

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 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