The back story of the Woodstock generation's coming of age

[Colin]

Director Ang Lee has had some incredible hits (Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Ice Storm) and misses (Hulk). His latest is somewhere in between.

The 1969 Woodstock Music & Art Fair, held at Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most pivotal epochs in popular music history.

Lee takes the risky gamble of making a movie however, which is NOT about the music and the concerts. Instead, Taking Woodstock is inspired by the true story of Elliot Tiber and his family, who inadvertently play a pivotal role in making the famed festival into the pivotal event it was. What you get instead is an up-close and personal look at the seminal happening that changed lives, not just of popular music and culture, but of the people involved with it, especially Tibor and his family.

Anchored between the Chicago riots at the Democratic convention, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the disastrous Rolling Stone concert at Altamont and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Woodstock was the vibrant blossoming of 60’s liberalism. It marks a decade that transformed a generation of young American adults, popular music, liberal culture and politics. Unbeknownst to them, it was the beginning of the end.

Taking Woodstock tells the back story of the beginnings and the end of life as Tibor and his family know it. If you are interested in some of the details of Woodstock and not the concert, you will enjoy this movie. No need to spend $10 to see it in the movie theater though, HT is enough.

Other than the interesting back story to Woodstock, a few stand out in this movie:

1 – Concert producer Michael Lang is unbelievably cool. Think James Bond with an Afro. Think Jesus on a white horse surveying a muddy field after a battle.

2 – Six foot, four inch Liev Schreiber (Scream trilogy, The Manchurian Candidate, Defiance, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) as a compassionate 240 pound transvestite.

3 – Yet another incredible performance from Imelda Staunton (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Vera Drake) as Tibor’s cankerous and greedy mother.