Taking Woodstock 2009

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: This is very light material, and, unusually for a Lee picture, not everybody in the ensemble appears to be acting in the same universe, let alone the same story. On the other hand: It's fun. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: The movie is undergroovy and overplotted. Read more

Kathleen Murphy, MSN Movies: If this Woodstock comes off as Edenic... don't assume the movie's advertising the real thing. Think of it as Ang Lee taking a vacation from too much reality. Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: It ends up being forgettable, when it could have taken a little piece of your heart. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: Lee and his producer and screenwriter, James Schamus, have turned Tiber's book into a gentle, rather tepid film. Its first half is modest and likable, but it goes on for over two hours. Read more

Joanne Kaufman, Wall Street Journal: Taking Woodstock is hardly a bad trip; just a very inconsequential one. Read more

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times: Taking Woodstock has its pleasures; it's really a sweet-natured coming-of-age tale, with a famously groundbreaking rock concert lurking in the background. Read more

Mike D'Angelo, AV Club: Demetri Martin makes little impression as Tiber, and the rest of the cast tends to indulge stale '60s stereotypes. Read more

Keith Phipps, AV Club: Lee's movie is pleasant enough, but it's too swept up in the spirit it's celebrating to ask the relevant questions. Read more

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: It is Woodstock light, which is one thing. It is also Ang Lee light, which is another thing altogether and far less satisfying. Read more

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: Lee has gone for shaggy comedy. Some of it is funny. Some of it just sits there. Read more

Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times: It's a frustrating complication of a movie with a sprawling story and grand ambitions -- and some truly grand acting -- that stumbles almost as often as it soars. Bummer. Read more

Andrea Gronvall, Chicago Reader: Ang Lee's 11th collaboration with producer James Schamus starts out strong and funny before getting mired in 60s nostalgia. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: The drama in question, Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, is a bit like the festival itself - a happy mess. Read more

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: Lee's larkiest film by far, Taking Woodstock features faces familiar and fresh. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: Lee takes the viewer on a sweet-enough and nicely personalized trip through a corner of the '60s. And even if he skips the main event, he finds plenty of color in its surroundings. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Lee captures the fractious, joyful, monstrously evolving mass it all was. Read more

Amy Nicholson, I.E. Weekly: I'm starting to suspect that Lee's insight into American thought is only a little deeper than a Western filmmaker who thinks he's brave for still bringing up bound feet. Read more

Charlie McCollum, San Jose Mercury News: The characters are all representative of the period but they come off as one-dimensional, more symbols than individuals. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: Watching the film feels a lot like leafing through an album of someone else's vacation photos: Pleasant, but gets old fast. Read more

Rafer Guzman, Newsday: Lee and producer-screenwriter James Schamus aim for comedy but come up with cliches. Read more

Anthony Lane, New Yorker: You can't deny the smiling mood that wafts through the film like incense, and to that extent it honors the original three days; but not once does a character's show of feeling stir you, send you, or stop you in your tracks, and the loss is unsustainable. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: Too much of Taking Woodstock seems barely sketched out. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: It's great that Taking Woodstock doesn't trample on anything sacred, but it also never arrives anywhere interesting. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: Taking Woodstock achieves an amazing feat: It turns the fabled music festival, a key cultural moment of the late 20th century, into an exceedingly lame, heavily cliched, thumb-sucking bore. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock is a coming-of-age comedy that roams the backstage and the back-story and sees that epic concert through rose-colored glasses. Read more

Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer: Lee distills the flavor of this transforming event and hints at how it transformed some who were there. His movie is a contact high. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: A project that is rather shapeless with a protagonist who is less than compelling. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: Taking Woodstock has the freshness of something being created, not remembered. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: All the tie-dye, reefer, skinny-dipping, split-screen cinematography (from Eric Gautier) and acid-trip psychedelics courtesy of Tiber's encounter with hippies (Paul Dano and Kelli Garner) can't make up for the film's major sin of omission: the music. Read more

Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com: It's harmless enough as a snapshot of a young man's awakening to the grand possibilities of adult life, but not particularly effective at capturing the spirit, the thrill or even the mud of this culturally monumental event. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: Taking Woodstock has the appeal of an inside story told from an especially good angle. But beyond that, the movie is a celebration of the way this event has gone into memory and of the meaning it has acquired. Read more

Dana Stevens, Slate: Even as a mind-clearing break from Lee's darker, more ambitious work, Taking Woodstock is an underachieving movie, so slight and gentle-spirited that it seems to be looking at the summer of 1969 through a scrim of rosy gauze. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Taking Woodstock has fine moments and an enjoyable vibe, but it never develops a coherent point of view. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Like the mild-mannered protagonist, Taiwanese director Ang Lee sees the '60s through a rose-colored telephoto lens, but his sympathetic spirit extends the generous message of the hippie era like a passed joint. Read more

Rick Groen, Globe and Mail: The script has a dubious source, taken from a memoir by Elliot Tiber that, based on this evidence, does nothing to scrape the rust off Woodstock's mythic cliche. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: Can you dig it? Maybe, if you aren't already up to your tie-dyed shorts in Woodstock memories, and if you can accept that there's relatively little music in this happy-go-lucky movie about history's most celebrated music festival. Read more

Richard and Mary Corliss, TIME Magazine: Lee's first total miscalculation, his first wholly inessential film. Read more

Hank Sartin, Time Out: Read more

Keith Uhlich, Time Out: Lee and Schamus make history blandly palatable; in the process, they rob the times and the people they're portraying of their complications. Read more

Geoff Andrew, Time Out: Undoubtedly one of Ang Lee's lighter films, 'Taking Woodstock' is also one of his better ones, and a welcome return to form. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: Lee's movie captures the mellow mood and mud-caked faces of the crowd but misses the reverberations of the counterculture revolution that brought the great unwashed to that farm. Read more

Todd McCarthy, Variety: A sort of let's-put-on-a-show summer-camp lark for director Ang Lee after the dramatic rigors of "Brokeback Mountain" and "Lust, Caution," the picture serves up intermittent pleasures but is too raggedy and laid-back for its own good. Read more

Melissa Anderson, Village Voice: Taking Woodstock does nothing more than recycle the same late-'60s tropes seen countless times since the Carter administration. Read more