Taking Woodstock 胡士托風波

As the movie opens, Elliot (Demetri Martin) is living with his elderly parents at their Catskills El Monaco Motel, which is on the brink of being taken over by the bank. A quiet, dutiful son, he cooks up ways to make something of the decrepit fleabag.

When Elliot hears that a three-day music festival has had its permit denied by a nearby town, he contacts the promoter (he already holds a permit for a music festival) and makes the introduction to a farmer whose green, hilly property is deemed ideal for the event. By mid-August, half a million young people would be making the pilgrimage to the farm that would become the site of a totemic event of a generation.

Lee makes a series of fascinating choices in "Taking Woodstock," starting with his decision to make Elliot the center of his story (the movie is based on Elliot Tiber's memoir of the same name). As a character Elliot is a more marginal figure, in the literal sense that he stays mostly at the edges of the Woodstock festival itself.

Baby boomers longing for a nostalgic re-enactment of the concert are advised to watch Michael Wadleigh's definitive 1970 documentary, "Woodstock," whose iconic moments and split-screen editing Lee acknowledges here with nods and outright quotes. "Taking Woodstock" steadfastly remains outside the main event and its familiar muddy scrum of hippies and hangers-on. Instead, Lee stays with the relatively straight-laced Elliot as he watches the world change outside his window.

"Taking Woodstock" unfolds at a genial, unforced pace; the movie's emotional high point is when Elliot, riding on the back of a policeman's motorcycle, takes a meandering trip through a serpentine throng of people making their way to the 600-acre pasture. It's a gorgeous sequence that manages to instill a sense of spontaneity and wonder in an event that has been otherwise ambered in mythology and nostalgia.

If other scenes aren't nearly as successful, there's still plenty to value in "Taking Woodstock," which radiates the very warmth and humanism that the concert itself came to stand for. Even at its most uneven and unprepossessing, this quirky, self-effacing little comedy takes its place in Lee's American oeuvre with quiet ease.

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