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September 3-9, 2009
buzz@boulderweekly.com
Wilted flower power
by Dave Taylor
Coming up short
by Betsy Sharkey
 Wilted flower power
by Dave Taylor
You’d have to be hiding under a rock not to know that August was the 40th anniversary of a little outdoor concert in upstate New York called Woodstock. On Aug. 15, 16 and 17, 1969, an incredible lineup of more than 30 folk and rock groups played on stage, including Ravi Shankar, Arlo Guthrie, The Grateful Dead, Joe Cocker, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Janis Joplin, Santana and Jimi Hendrix.
With 500,000 in attendance, Woodstock took place in the small (population 4,200) Catskills town of Bethel, about 100 miles north of Manhattan. The movie Taking Woodstock is based on the book by the same name written by Bethel motel owner Elliot Teichberg.
Director Ang Lee does a good enough job with the historical retelling of Elliot’s (Demetri Martin) story of Woodstock, but fails to create engaging characters, instead leaving us with a motley collection of one-dimensional caricatures, like the scroungy misunderstood Vietnam war vet (Emile Hirsch), Elliot’s stereotypically Jewish parents, the angry, critical and secretive Sonia (Imelda Staunton), and the long-suffering Jake (Henry Goodman).
If you were at Woodstock or even love the music, you’ll be disappointed how little of the concert shows up in the film too: It’s exactly mirrored by the presence of the momentous Apollo 11 landing in the film, which we see on TV, all but the most pivotal moment of Armstrong taking that one giant leap for mankind.
There were attempts to create drama in the movie and to perhaps dip a toe into the waters of a coming-of-age film, but both fell flat.
For example, at one point Elliot visits his sister in Manhattan and they commiserate about their parents and the failing motel, but she never shows up again, even as the family motel becomes the central focus of Woodstock planning. Elliot also gets mad at his mother in one scene, but in a very tentative manner, and their relationship is never resolved. In a third element, the local toughs paint anti-Semitic slogans on the wall of the hotel, but they are never seen again.
The film starts with Elliot as the president of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, even though he lives in New York City and is far younger than any of the other business owners in the Chamber. The family motel is $5,000 in arrears, and they’re begging the bank to let them have just a few more months to pay off their debt. With few other options on the horizon, Elliot reads about the Woodstock concert losing its permit to perform in Wallkill, N.Y., and contacts Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff), offering him their acreage for the concert.
There was lots of split-screen added to the film, and a lot of digital compositing, adding the actors to stock footage from the Woodstock concert (think Forrest Gump), much of which was pretty obvious but all of which gave us a much needed actual view of the concert venue and, once or twice, the concert itself.
Organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society appear in the film, too, but unlike the actual SDS and its radical ’60s activism, in Taking Woodstock the group is portrayed as a completely innocuous bunch handing out bumperstickers and complaining about the U.S. presence in Vietnam.
Taking Woodstock is not a bad film, even given my comments, and there are some amusing moments, but ultimately the lack of any actual dramatic storyline and the preponderance of stereotypes and caricatures doom it to being boring when the concert most definitely wasn’t. I’d wait until it was on DVD if you watch it at all, or perhaps consider the 1970s documentary Woodstock instead.
Dave Taylor has been watching movies for as long as he can remember and sees at least 500 films a year. You can find his longer, more detailed reviews at www.DaveOnFilm.com or follow his movie updates on Twitter as @FilmBuzz.
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 Coming up short
by Betsy Sharkey
What would you wish for if you found a rainbow-colored rock that told you to make a wish, then granted every wish you made?
Would you go for world peace? A million bucks? Or, like the kids in Shorts, would you wish for a cool castle and a moat protected by snakes and alligators, not realizing the complications that might crop up?
Me, I’d wish for writer-director Robert Rodriguez to set aside the kid stuff and see if he can’t get closer to the promise of his earlier work... right after world peace and a million bucks.
Here’s some food for thought. In Shorts, one of the centerpiece moments features a big, slimy, green special-effect booger monster named Booger Monster, which probably cost far more than the $7,000 and change Rodriguez spent to make the terrific 1992 thriller El Mariachi.
Yes, I realize this is a children’s movie. Yes, I understand that Booger Monster is aimed right at the slime-loving hearts of 9-year-old boys everywhere. But Dr. Noseworthy’s (William H. Macy) heart-to-heart with his son about the downside of eating booger bits — now that was just gross, as opposed to great gross, and there is an important distinction between the two. If Bill Macy can’t make the Shorts boogers great gross-out fun, who in the world possibly can?
But I digress. The story’s narrator, and central player, is an 11-year-old named Toe Thompson (Jimmy Bennett). He lives in the company town of Black Falls Hall with his parents, played by Jon Cryer and Leslie Mann. Like the rest of the grown-ups, they work for the nefarious Black Box Industries, a company that makes powerful black boxes, basically super-gadgets that can transform into whatever you need.
James Spader, always a good choice for a bad guy, is Mr. Black, the nasty head of the company. He’s got crush-the-competition, take-over-the-world ambitions that just won’t let him rest. In a case of the crayon not falling far from the box, his kids — Cole Black (Devon Gearhart) and Helvetica (Jolie Vanier) — are the school bullies, and Toe turns out to be their favorite target.
Rounding out Toe’s wrecking crew is his teenage sister Stacey (Kat Dennings), who finds him completely repulsive. In other words, even the kids in the audience could see the nuance marching out the back door.
The story is intentionally broken apart into segments, then tossed around and put back together again in no particular order by Toe as he zooms forward and back across the tale of rainbow rock. It’s basically one hot potato of a bad wish after another, although the whirling gizmos that clean up Toe’s room in a flash were not bad, at least at the start.
The main problem with Shorts, and there are many, is in the execution. There are holes in the story that a 3-year-old could point out, the many fine comedic grown-ups are mostly squandered, and the “message” part of the movie for the kids seems as if it were thrown together during a school detention, resulting in a wrap-up that feels required and hasty.
The best moments are when the kids — both the bad and good ones — are plotting and scheming together, but even the tension that should have crackled through those moments kept fizzling. All of which made Shorts play like a very, very, very long Saturday-morning show.
—MCT, Chicago Tribune
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