I'm getting very sentimental; I wept through a great deal of TAKING WODSTOCK, probably weeping more for the past 40 years and the friends I haven't seen since August 1969, but I absolutely loved the film. It's very funny, moving and quite nostaslgic. Like MILK, I couldn't tell where the authentic footage ended and the new began, and I thought, like MILK, the period was captured really well, especially a quiet rural community in the Catskills. My friend Matthew was in Buffalo in August 1969 and he remembers the clogged highways. I was in Middletown, OH, following a season of summer theatre and waiting for my second year of grad school to begin. This is two weekends past the original Festival, August 15-18 - and I remember seeing the footage on the news.
There's a nudist theatre company - shades of my experimental theatre days in college and the first nude Off-off-Broadway show I ever saw in the summer of 1969! - and a lot of other nudity as well. There are some really wonderful performances; Jonathan Groff as one of the Woodstock Festival promoters looks like Steve Curry in the original cast of HAIR. Liev Schreiber is wonderful as a drag queen Korean War veteran, Emil Hirsch continues to impress me as a screwed up Viet Nam vet, and I loved British actor Henry Goodman as the father of the leading character played by Demetri Martin. Imelda Staunton as his mother is an interesting character. I think I'll spend tomorrow listening to music from 1968 to 1970.
