This is the first good thing I’ve heard about it but based on your recommendation I will check it out.
Someday, as the boomers age, our country will finally get over Woodstock.
Flick looks ok. I’d heard that the ads are avoiding a coming-out story.
The coming out story is very subtly told. It’s established right off that Elliot had been dipping his toe in gay waters before the action of the film begins, but REALLY gets into it once “Woodtosck” gets started. However this isn’t presented as a “big deal.” It’s part and parcel of any number of other events.
That may be the answer. Most don’t harken back to Woodstock and instantly think “gay.” In fact, “gay” doesn’t even enter into the equation. It’s hippies and brown acid and mud and Hendrix and free love (the straight variety) and the whole dawning of the age of Aquarius.
“Gay” at the time of Woodstock was the group of rag-tag drag queens getting clubbed by the police at the Stonewall Inn, lonely old lesbians (or young) preparing to listen to Janis Ian lament about when she was 17 and couldn’t be a pretty cheerleader, or those pathetic characters in that even more pathetic film The Boys in the Band. Granted, Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck helped to start the winds of change in that same year, but it took a long while before those images would change.
From what you’re saying, it sounds like this new film is attempting to be revisionist and overstepping the mark, no?
Whaaaat? I’ve been hearing nothing but great things about it. I haven’t heard one bad thing yet
i don’t know,i’ll be seeing it,sure…..but there are so many films that deserve buzz(especially non-U.S.),if this does get any negative one,it would be just a small taint for Ang Lee,nothing more….
“Woodstock was no achievement for Max. The festival was just an extraordinary event that widened his experience in life because of his contact with these people.” -Mrs. Miriam (Mimi) Yasgur
That’s a terrific sentiment. Max Yasgur was fifty when he opened his land to the hordes. Still relatively young. Still able to grow. Maybe there is hope that this same capacity for growth may be encouraged in the hordes who are gripped by fear and bigotry and who, defiantly, permit their ignorance to stand in the way of progress in our present moment.
Not revisionist at all. The “ra-tag drag queens” fought back. That was the whole point of “Stonewall.” The street was OURS for a week and Gay Liebration was born.
There are refernces to what was going on in New York in “Taking Woodstock.” As for the hippies, exclusive heterosexuality was scarcely the story . Don’t you know “Hair”? It’s about a bisexual menage a trois.
Hair was also about young white women hooking up with young black men and making the swirl. Quelle horreur!
“From what you’re saying, it sounds like this new film is attempting to be revisionist and overstepping the mark, no?”
Why not see the film before you label it. Or maybe you missed the title of this thread and all the problems with “ebuzz” which is usually a lot criticisms by people who haven’t seen the films they’re criticizing.
I thinkjudgment of a film before seeing it is also something that should be put into practice. Previews serve a purpose outside the marketing schemes; they show bits and pieces of the actual film. When I saw the preview for this film it gave me the same impression that Across the Universe gave me, and I’m still trying to recover the 2 hours of my life I wasted watching that film. To me “Taking Woodstock” looks like its going to suck, the same way “Gamer” looks like its going to suck. We all know Ang Lee can make some awful movies and I know this is one of those. I have not see it and I doubt I’ll have the time to waste watching another Woodstock movie. Give me a f-n break, of all the things in the world another Woodstock movie? I wish the babyboomers would stop trying to sell and repackage their lame memories. Judging by the plot alone I can tell that the movie is going to suck, it sounds like a list of clichés.
I don’t think of The Boys in the Band as pathetic, I like that film, I think it’s brave and beautiful. The sad fact is that a lot of gay lives are still lonely, disorderly, anxiety-and-guilt-ridden, and confrontational — it’s just considered “progress” not to talk about them and to focus on the couples trooping off to certain states to get married and adopt children. These couples too are also engaged in changing the heterosexual paradigm, but only time will tell if the settling-down, family option proves to be any happier than the default option of living in the margins of society.
I just saw the Woodstock movie advertised last night and it looked very trippy. That might have been the way the commercial slanted it, but it looked fun.
@STRAWDAWG — I wasn’t labeling the film at all; I was responding to David’s analysis. You see that I began the sentence with, “From what you’re saying, it sounds like …” If I were labeling it, I would have said, “This film is clearly revisionist.” Truthfully, I think I’m going ot be a purist and stick with the great documentary instead.
@DAVID and JUSTIN — A few years back, TCM ran a night of “Gays in the Movies,” or some such thing. I was down with a cold, and I’m always interested in new ideas and ways in which to approach film, so I decided to take a look. The first film was a noir about a man “living with his horrible secret.” At the end, he killed himself. Then came The Children’s Hour, in which a frumpy, mannish plain-Jane Shirley MacLaine s in love with beautiful Audrey Hepburn. By the end of the film she knows she can’t get the love she wants because she’s just too horrible to live, so she kills herself. Then came The Killing of Sister George. I don’t remember much of this because it damned-near bored me to tears, but at the end a lesbian kills herself (I don’t remember if she was the titular “Sister George”). Freebie and the Bean and Cruising, the latter easily one of the most horrible films I’ve ever seen, offered a new twist. The gays presented in these films were psychopaths, so the heroes had to kill them.
Then came The Boys in the Band. At this point I had alerted some gay friends as to what was being offered and a few of them were watching in their respective places, too. We got two hours of whining, obnoxious, insecure, maladjusted, mincing girlie-men wallowing in their own pathos. Maybe my friends and I are too young or too urban or even too hip-to-be-square, but even my gay friends said if this was the way gays were — and, more importantly, if this is the way they were presented to society at large — they would have hated them, too. I think some were actually hoping a few of the characters would have been knocked-off in this one.
David is right – most of us do know the world with at least a little more tolerance (and honesty ), and I’m happy that the gay people I know are at least happy, not to mention accomplished, secure and well-adjusted. And, yes, I do tip my hat to those Stonewall people who did fight back. Good for them. It began to break down the walls presented (and enhanced ) by these relics that are the films I mentioned.
I can’t wait for this film to come out. I’m a huge 60’s fanatic and am a slave to the music of that decade. This is such a treat right after the new Blu-ray Woodstock box set just came out
But Christopher, those films all come from a different era, when gay suicide rates were notoriously high. What you are claiming was a melodramatic “bad treatment” of gay characters was simple honesty. Political correctness has done a lot of good things, but it’s also had the negative effect, in art, of demanding that everything be presented more positively than it really is. I’m glad that you know happy gay people, and I’m sure it does make you feel better to know they are happy — but, think of a gay kid growing up in a fundamentalist family and being sent to a brainwashing camp, or a gay person who has to stay closeted because he or she is in a high profile or celebrity position. Problems remain, and it’s not a bad thing to have films that address them. A lot of gay people haven’t made it, and don’t make it, and that shouldn’t be swept under the rug in an effort to make us all “feel better.”
For that matter there are a lot of period melodramas in which heterosexual characters come to various bad ends. A lot of the women’s pictures of the 40s, with Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and others, feature long-suffering females — many of these remain great films, even though the case has been made that this is a pre-feminist or even anti-feminist view of the world. Actually I think on a human level it really doesn’t matter, because the films are concerned with an emotional reality — the same with a lot of vintage gay-themed films — and this emotional reality is something that can always exist.
Ultimately it seems to me that the preference for “happy messages” about gay people is another way of silencing them and of taking their lives less seriously — under the guise of being concerned that they’re being presented in a way that is too dark or too problem-ridden.
Personally I can’t wait to see Taking Woodstock, mainly becuase it has one of my favorite comics acting debut, Dimitri Martin, haha.
Actually, Christopher, in “The Killing of Sister George” she doesn’t kill herself. The character she was playing on a TV seral — “Sister George” — was killed off, and she was fired. And the reason she was fired was because her gayness made the papers.
Beryl Reid, Susannah York, and Coral Browne are all really good in TKOSG. I think that movie is fascinating.
Re: “obnoxious, insecure, maladjusted, mincing girlie-men wallowing in their own pathos.”
Yep, sounds like a few gay friends or acquaintances of mine.
I also know many gay men who are secure, good-natured, full of joy, and carry on succesful, happy lives.
It’s almost like gay men represent a spectrum of human nature.
But on a given day in 1970, it would not have been difficult to find a group of
outcasts (due to their sexual persuasion) who had mutually established
a coterie for which self-loathing and despair were the norm.
So I don’t dismiss out of hand THE BOYS IN THE BAND.
And gay men can’t be psychopaths?
What about Dahmer and Gacy?
“It’s almost like gay men represent a spectrum of human nature.”
mmmh… I wonder if they are really human like the rest of us…. I wonder….
“It’s almost like gay men represent a spectrum of human nature.”
What, as opposed to being subhuman, or scary aliens? So many of the comments here are self-revealing of an extreme ignorance.
there are many on here who think they know all. I am new to the site. Do you all have to listen to this David and Justin? They don’t strike me as that smart.
That was sarcasm, as the two preceding sentences were intended to indicate.
My remark would have been quite clear if I had been speaking,
but as written it is obviously (now) too cryptic to sound ironic.
Sorry about that.
But my point in the entire post is that, yes, gay people do indeed span the spectrum of human behavioral types.
That those types are negative in certain motion pictures in no way diminishes the validity of the portrayals.
people won’t get over woodstock as long as there are still people
“yes, gay people do indeed span the spectrum of human behavioral types.
That those types are negative in certain motion pictures in no way diminishes the validity of the portrayals.”
Which is why such portrayals should be examined and questioned. “The Boys in the Band” may have “negative protrayals” but it’s true and honest. “Cruising” on the other hand is a toatal piece of crap.
To return to the subject, I find he portrayal of Elliot Tibor and hsi adventures in “Taking Woodstock” to be quite true to that era. The media are aways blocking things off arbitarily. “Hippie” is supposed to begin in one year and ened in the other. “Gya” isn’t suppsoed to appear until “Stonewall.” Neither supposition is true. In “Taking Woodstock” the two modes overlap.
Not to veer this thread off into yet another direction, but Ganster’s remark
about Ehrenstein and Vicari strikes me as…what’s the word I’m looking for…hostile.
I’ve had a few differences with both of them.
In my view, each is a bit over-impassioned at times, and convey a rather grim political view here and there.
But what person, with any kind of reading comprehension skills worth having,
would suggest that Ehrenstein or Vicari isn’t smart?
You’ll have to do much, much better than that, Ganster.
I think I will enjoy this film. It doesn’t look like something I would go crazy over, but I’m glad you liked it, David. It makes me more excited for it.
To amplify Dr. Lemonglow’s comments, personally speaking, I only “follow” two individuals on this site who just happen to be David and Justin.
Berjuan….I agree that from the previews the movie looks terrible and I don’t plan on seeing it.Although perhaps it’s just a bad trailer.However I don’t understand your comment about “another” woodstock movie.Like there have been 20 of them over the years.Don’t recall any besides the original doc.I do agree however that the whole Woodstock thing has been vastly overplayed by the media.But then they overplay everything….Michael Jackson…
David Ehrenstein
Saw “Taking Woodstock” today and it’s absolutely lovely. Speaking as somone WAY old enough to remember when, this captures the zeitgeist of that era perfectly. Not only are all the music cues right, but so is the hair, and more importantly the tone. Dimitri Martin is a really pleasant surprise. Not only can he act at the ground floor level, he gets the subtleties (of which there are many) right away. I love the look of glory on his face the morning after having nailed a hot electrician. This is a memento of a time an palce coupled with a family drama AND a coming out story. Eilliot is a good son in the classic American Jewish tradition. He wants to do right by his parents — impossible though they may be. But he wants to break away too. “Woodstock” gives him the chance to do both. Henry Godman and Imedla Stauton are great as his parents. Live Schreiber is teriffic as an all-wise drag queen. Emile Hirsch is as lovely as ever sliding through the mud. Plus there’s Eugene Levy as Max Yasgur, the gorgeous Michael Goff as a festival honcho. Mamie Gummer (Meryl spawn) as the echt hippie chick, and a host of others.
Don’t so much as THINK of missing this.