Motel Woodstock

From reading some of the other comments it sounds like most people that are disappointed in this film were mainly put off due to their expectations for a film that focuses on the music.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. I loved the unique focus on the small town that hosted the festival and how it affected all of their lives. I believe it was a great way to really capture the vibe of Woodstock without getting too rapt up in the actual musicians that were playing, which to me has been focused on enough over the years.

If you have been to a multiple day festival before you will have a wonderful sense of nostalgia. This movie completely captures how amazing people can be when they remove themselves from the hum drum monotony of their day to day lives and get together with like minded strangers for a few days of complete freedom and joy.

A great feel good movie with a lot of veiled depth about the people that helped make Woodstock one of the most famous events the world has known.

I like how director Ang Lee offers something different with every film. The first tim ei laid my eyes upon his work was with 2003's "Hulk".....now a lot of people hated that movie, but i found it very enjoyable. Then of course there is "Brokeback Mountain", in which i found it rather bland. But his last movie, "Lust Caution" was probably the one i disliked the most. However, each of his films are very different......no, not just with their stories, but the way they are each presented.......and in my eye, he presents them very well. And honestly, i cannot wait to see him take a hack at a period piece such as Woodstock. Here is something i liked more than anything in the movie.......rather than WOW you with awesome music, or have them cut the camera away to show Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix.......they actually focus on the how this all came together, which was great......because not only was the story very entertaining, but it created this essence about the concert, that it was something far off in the distance that you would never see, and you only heard people talking about it......i mean you obviously know now what it was all about.....but it takes you on this incredible journey of this small town family, and when you finally get a small glimpse of the concert......oh my goodness, it was enough to take your breathe away. Mainl because you see all this preparation, and all these people.....you want to see what all this fuss is about, but it never goes deep inside, and that is what i loved about this movie. It focused its lense on the people to the side, the ones who were the most important, and it showed how they viewed this concert. But the one thing that i must talk about is the scene when our main character first arrives at the actual field......hence, the acid phase. Now im sure you have seen some cool stuff in other movies like "Fear in Loathing" or "Yellow Submarine", because i surely have........but i can assure you this.......that was probably the realist acid trip ever caught on camera. At times, i literally had to look away from the screen and wipe the drool off my face, because it was too real. It captures the feeling of being at an actual festival, better than anything i have ever seen on film before. Job well done in that department. Bottom Line.......great movie. That is it. Now im sure most of you want the whole, hey lets meet the bands and what not......if you want that, you can watch a million documentaries about it on VH1. But this movie takes you on a much different trip. One that i actually liked. Let's face it.....i have lived that life, and it is now gone from me........but it certainly created those old feelings in my soul once more. Fantastic period piece. Easily my favorite Ang Lee film to date.

Taking Woodstock is a personal story about a young man finding himself at a time when his generation was trying to do that throughout the world. It is not a "docudrama" about the event, so people expecting to relive the Woodstock festival, take note. Elliot's struggles and evolution through this unique event are another of Ang Lee's wonderfully textured allegories. That this fellow raised in China can so pointedly create the full emotional spectrum of the "youth movement" of that time is a testament to his artistry. This movie takes on a series of serious ideas with a light flair. Go in prepared to "go with the flow" and you'll leave feeling free, man.

Ang Lee and James Schamus like their hippie culture, and love themselves that August 1969 summer of Woodstock, and also the act of trying to capture it on film as it was to be there, on the outside and suddenly coming into the fold of looking in. One can feel the love for the period, the people, the music, the drugs, the whole scene, man. If it doesn't make for the greatest movie it might just be cause Lee has decided to make a precisely light-hearted affair with some fun moments but nothing really hard-hitting with its coming-of-age story. It's a been-there-done-that affair in terms of the major characters, and its more significant background subject provides more of the color and excitement in its two-hour run time.

It's basically about the people behind the scenes at Woodstock (we never see anyone famous, aside from certain semi-figures like Michael Lang and Max Yasgur, portrayed by actors), specifically the young guy Eliot who got together the Woodstock-financial people to his small town as part of Bethel, New York, and helped also to give (politely putting it) a boost to his parents' motel business. We see some of the ups and downs, the downs being things like gangsters trying to muscle their way into the earnings of the thousands of people flocking upstate to frequent the motel (and the up of getting 'security' with transvestite Liev Schreiber in an awesome performance), or just with Elliot's parents and how their attitudes stay mostly the same- what's with these damn kids and their hair and sex and drugs anyway- until towards the end of the three days of peace/love/music.

It's a funny movie for at least a good amount of its run-time. The writer Schamus knows how to milk some laughs out of small-town fears and those scenes of freak-outs that shake up the quiet veneer of rural upstate New York. One good example of this are the folks in the 'theater troupe' who live in Elliot's barn and who remind one of the mime troupe from Easy Rider (lots of naked reenactments of Chekhov). And I even liked how Martin navigates himself in scenes where he has to act perplexed but not show it too much like, "oh, hey, lots of hippies, OK, got to get back to work, whoa!" When it comes time for the more dramatically demanding scenes from Martin (a relatively inexperienced actor and mostly comedian by the way) he falls flat, or looks wonky when tripping his ass off with Paul Dano - a weird but affecting scene, by the way.

Lee decided, more or less, to just take it easy this time around. After the heavy head-trips of Hulk, Brokeback Mountain and Lust Caution, the guy needed to have a laugh, and what better way than to have some good times and breezy moments in reflecting on the one time hippies didn't get stomped down by cops or just wear lots of flowers in their hair. And when its airy and fun it works. When it tries to add some complexity (i.e. a gay innuendo moment is put out there and then never really mentioned again much to my dismay) and starts to get a little preachy towards the last quarter with Elliot having to come to terms with his life and working at his parent's motel (and discovering a dark secret about his rambunctious, irascible old Russian-Jewish mother played respectably by Imelda Staunton) it falls flat on its face. But its worth watching for those little moments - like when Elliot rides on the back of the motorcycle cop through the dense traffic of the road to the Woodstock concert. It's like the good-natured version of the traffic jam from Godard's Week End: less a-holes and more hippies.

I saw this movie being very attracted by the trailer which seemed to offer fun and deep involvement. Now I have seen it, and I can say that it is enjoyable, but not fully convincing. Obviously, Ang Lee drifts attention from the concerts and the music of those three epic days in 1969 to focus on the personal story of a young man and his odd family who worked and lived in the background of this great event. The characters are engaging, very well interpreted, but in the end I missed the real protagonist, music, being it the powerful means through which these young people gave voice to their need for change and revolution and which was revolutionary, indeed. The atmosphere of those days is rendered vividly, we get many physical perceptions, of naked bodies, mud, rain, sun, but not acoustic ones, and I perceived this as a flaw throughout the movie. In the end you ask yourself: wasn't Woodstock mainly a three-day concert? Where is music? The movie is solidly directed, the director knows perfectly what kind of product he wants to offer, and in the end we get fun and reflection around, but never inside an event, which never comes to be explicit. Very good actorial interpretations (Imelda Staunton playing the mother is simply wonderful), although the characters themselves appear to be looking for a soundtrack which lacks till the end.