Loyola Greyhound

Issue date: 9/1/09 Section: Arts & Society

Media Credit: MCT campus The fields of Woodstock are pictured above. Forty years ago this former dairy farm became ground zero for a music festival that would define a generation.

A little over forty years ago, a musical revolution occurred in a humble upstate New York venue tucked in the countryside of the Catskills, simply titled Woodstock. It is the pinnacle of all music festivals and has since become the template for so many to follow. And yet it seems none will never quite measure up the profound reverberations left in those muddy hills.

Names you might be familiar with such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and The Who graced the stage in front of a massive crowd of over a half a million hippies who considered this concert to be a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts, a place where music played through the day and night, drugs were abundant, and peace reigned supreme.

In the film "Taking Woodstock" from Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain), the origins of the concert and how it snowballed into a cultural snapshot of a lost generation are explored through the eyes of a failed interior designer Elliot Teichberg. Elliot (played by Demetri Martin) inadvertently finds himself a key player in bringing Woodstock to his small town, White Lake, New York.

Coming back from New York City for the summer nearly flat broke, Elliot must tend to his parents' decaying El Monaco hotel that is facing foreclosure. Desperate to save the hotel he enlists a theater troupe to do performances on the premises and he renews his permit to have a small music and arts festival that normally consists of local bands and records played over a PA system all in an attempt to attract much-needed tourists to the area.

When a nearby town protests against having the already planned Woodstock festival, (mainly due to the fear of a thieving hippie invasion), Elliot decides to use his vaguely written and more importantly approved concert permit to persuade concert producer Michael Lang to bring his festival to White Lake.

The rest of the film then explores the development of the concert (turning a dairy farm into a concert venue and turning the El Monaco hotel into the organizer's headquarters).

It's in this development stage that things start to sag in the film as tensions run high with neighbors who are completely ignorant of the true behaviors of hippies and there seems to be too many scenes of business meetings that could have easily been summated in one compact scene.

Continued...

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