Taking Woodstock
- Title: Taking Woodstock
- IMDB: link
Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lust, Caution, The Ice Storm) has crafted some moving films over the years. He’s also responsible for a few which have missed the mark (Hulk, Ride With the Devil). Sadly, his latest is the later. In terms of recreating the scope and magnitude of Woodstock, the film succeeds, but in almost every other way it fails to impress.
In Taking Woodstock, Lee takes on a subject which has been done to death in film and television over the years. Not surprisingly, the director finds it hard to bring anything new to the table.
The story centers around the creation of the event and how it transforms a small community into the lovefest for the ages. The Daily Show alum Demetri Martin stars as the bright skittish young man (was this role originally pitched to Michael Cera?) who uses the event to help save his parent’s failing hotel by finagling a deal with the organizers of the event to hold it on the farmland of a neighbor (Eugene Levy).
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Quentin Tarantino is a filmmaker. Love him or hate him, the man has a passion and reverence for cinema as well as a definite style in crafting his own projects. Inglourious Basterds, the writer/director’s latest, took more than a decade to come to the screen. The film is many things, but boring isn’t one of them. Insane and glorious, Tarantino has finally succeeded in crafting a film I can’t help but love.
Bandslam is a cliched, hackneyed, overdone, montage-filled paint-by-numbers tale of teenage angst, love, lessons about life, and triumph.
Let’s get this straight right from the get-go: I had no real expectations with this film except wanting to leave without getting too bored or having the film make my eyes bleed. One out of two isn’t bad. Even with the bar set so low G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra finds a way to slither underneath like champion limbo dancer Hermes Conrad.