Film: Woodstock: The Director's Cut"

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The Beach Theatre is sold out of their online tickets but still have about 35 tickets to sell at the box office which opens at 12:30pm today.
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On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival and WMNF's Woodstock "re-creation", we present:
"Woodstock: The Director's Cut," a documentary about the 1969 three-day concert held in Bethel, NY, on a 600 acre dairy farm. The original documentary was released in 1970 and became the film that best described the sixties in its positive manifestation of peace and love; it was tremendously influential in sending the "hippie message" to every corner of the country. If you missed the Sixties and want to know what it was all about, here is where you start. "The Director's Cut" contains an extra 44 minutes of footage and the sound is now in Dolby Digital.

STORY: "Nearly 40 years after its theatrical release, Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock remains the titan of rock documentaries. Few docus, rock or otherwise, can approach its ability to immerse audiences in a particular place and time... Held over three days in August, 1969, just outside the rolling farmlands of Bethel, N.Y., the Woodstock music festival showcased some of the best rock and folk of that decade, including the Who; Jimi Hendrix; Janis Joplin; Sly and the Family Stone; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Joe Cocker; Santana; Creedence Clearwater Revival; the Grateful Dead; Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Country Joe & the Fish and many others."

"But the event transcended that of rock 'n' roll spectacle. It drew an estimated 400,000 people -- far eclipsing what its organizers had anticipated -- to become an iconic touchstone in an era of unparalleled social upheaval. The young people across the country who attended endured rain, mud, food shortages and poor sanitation, but the tradeoff was worth the countercultural bliss. In many respects, Woodstock proved to be the final hurrah for a generation that believed it could change the world."

"For historical purposes alone, Woodstock would be worthwhile viewing. But director Michael Wadleigh possessed the ambition, vision and skill to do it right. Armed with a gaggle of hungry young moviemakers (including a then-unknown Martin Scorsese), Wadleigh employed 16 cameras to record more than 100 miles of celluloid. The result, an overwhelming mass of sights and sounds, proved ideal for generous use of split screens. The effect brilliantly conveys the full-blown Woodstock experience -- the music, traffic jams, drugs, mud, skinny-dipping and, of course, the bad brown acid that prompted a warning from the stage. Used in Woodstock several years before split screens would become a cliché of Seventies cinema, the multiple images give Wadleigh leeway to make ironic visual juxtapositions and sly observations."

REVIEW: "The music is great, and the performances are enhanced by unusually intimate camerawork. While modern-day rockumentaries typically trade in quick edits and stylistic gimmickry, Wadleigh prefers long, uninterrupted shots. Richie Havens' two numbers that are showcased, 'Handsome Johnny' and 'Freedom / Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,' are nearly hypnotic in their intensity. The Who, Joe Cocker, Sly and the Family Stone and Ten Years After are equally riveting, while Hendrix's guitar assault on 'The Star-Spangled Banner' remains one of rock 'n' roll's singular milestones. Even the lesser performances are fascinating. A clearly stoned John Sebastian provides some laughably hippie-dippy chatter before launching into 'Younger Generation,' which at least gave the filmmakers an opportunity to do a montage of Woodstock babies and toddlers."

"Still, what makes the Oscar-winning film resonate 40 years later is the time that the cameras spend away from the stage. The Sixties' youth movement is captured for posterity, in all its irony-free, tiedyed, psychedelic, hair-flapping, glassy-eyed idealism. Many of the young people interviewed are inadvertently hilarious. One conspiracy-minded young man blames the rain on governmental cloud-seeding. A yoga instructor promises her pupils, 'If you do it right, you'll be flashing momentarily.' The outpouring of naiveté and enthusiasm, even if pot-addled, is curiously endearing."

"The 228-minute director's cut adds about 45 minutes to an already-lengthy movie. Woodstock aficionados won't mind the additional couch time. Included in the extended version are performances by Canned Heat (great), Joplin (not one of her best showings) and Jefferson Airplane (so-so), as well as Hendrix tearing through 'Voodoo Chile (Slight Return).'" - Written by Phil Bacharach on DVDtalk.com