Starring: Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton, Eugene Levy, Liev Schreiber
Director: Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility)
Running Time: 1 hr 50 min
Release Date: August 28, 2009
Budget: $30 million
Average Critics’ Score: 49%
“…thoughtful, playful, often amusing…” Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter
“…an exceedingly lame, heavily clichéd, thumb-sucking bore.” Lou Lumenick, New York Post
The titular iconic ‘60s music festival is a legend, but audiences won’t even remember this low-key film the next day. You’d think this behind-the-scenes tale of how a soul-searching twenty-something (Martin) organized Woodstock would be at least an iota as interesting as the festival, but it’s not. The music and the actual event are disappointingly bypassed, and any character development for these initially complex characters (like Hirsch’s mentally damaged war veteran) goes unexplored. Martin at least gives a soulful, relatable performance, and Staunton is delightful as his cranky, extremist mother. Lee’s split-screens and funky kaleidoscopic cinematography capture the period well, but otherwise he sticks to hippy stereotypes of lots of nakedness and “far outs.”
