{"id":41634,"date":"2009-08-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-13T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/woodstock-3-days-of-peace-music-the-directors-cut-dvd\/"},"modified":"2009-08-13T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-13T00:00:00","slug":"woodstock-3-days-of-peace-music-the-directors-cut-dvd","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/woodstock-3-days-of-peace-music-the-directors-cut-dvd\/","title":{"rendered":"Woodstock: 3 Days Of Peace & Music: The Director’s Cut (DVD)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cMost of us need approval from our neighbors before we can actually let it all hang down,\u201d remarked Sly Stone after his movie-stealing performance of \u201cI Want To Take You Higher.\u201d With this, Sly encapsulates the major theme of Woodstock: 3 Days Of Peace & Music: <\/i>approval.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Although most likely said in a spirit of rebellion, Sly read his audience well. Michael Wadleigh\u2019s documentary of the famous concert festival centers around the 1960 counterculture\u2019s attempt to legitimize their belief system and lifestyle. Most attendees thought that the success of Woodstock <\/i>did just that. This sentiment shows up in various dialogue, from one of the event\u2019s coordinators saying \u201cIf you have to be afraid to smile at somebody, what kind of way is that to go through life\u201d to an elderly townsman stating, \u201cMaybe if pot made them peaceful, we should all smoke pot.\u201d Amidst the open drug use, free love, politics, and musical performances, the movie portrays thousands of people searching for legitimacy and approval.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Woodstock <\/i>is a documentary in the purest sense. It documents without offering any explanation, interpretation, or background information. And while Woodstock the concert may have been about the music, Woodstock <\/i>the movie is more about the people. From the plumber servicing the Port-o-San toilets to the druggie rambling about how military planes are feeding water to the clouds to create rain and ruin their peaceful day, the movie provides explicit documentation of the interactions and relationships amongst the attendees. Amazingly, for a community that claimed to value individualism, conformity is intensely prominent in the film. One telling scene has thousands of people, led by a man on a microphone, trying to chant the inconvenient rain away as if precipitation is concerned with their whims. As I watched scenes of naked mud sliding, wild dancing, and grass-field love making, I could not help but see how this community of so-called individualists starkly mirrored the sentiment of conformity they purported to rebel against.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Amidst the fascinating sociological aspect of Woodstock, <\/i>the movie also documents some of the worst and best performances I have ever seen. Let us start with the best! Joe Cocker and the Grease Band\u2019s rendition of the Beatles\u2019s \u201cHigh With A Little Help From My Friends\u201d evokes such raw power and emotion that I could not resist being drawn to Cocker\u2019s enigmatic stage presence. The simplicity and perfectly executed harmonies of Crosby, Stills & Nash make their performance of \u201cJudy Blues Eyes\u201d one of the best in the film, followed by Janis Joplin\u2019s ecstatic \u201cWork Me, Lord.\u201d And while much is said about Jimi Hendrix\u2019s version of \u201cThe Star Spangled Banner,\u201d partly because of the imagery of the protesting patriot and the irony of a war song being played at a peace festival, the true stars of the movie become Sly And The Family Stone, whose performance is not only musically ingenious but artistically captivating. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

Now for the terrible performances! Joan Baez, whose husband was apparently incarcerated at the time, tortures the audience with such a boring performance that she made me wish I too was in federal prison. Both Jefferson Airplane performances (\u201cWon\u2019t You Try\u201d and \u201cUncle Sam\u2019s Blues\u201d) are so needlessly long and musically verbose that they made me wish I was listening to Joan Baez. Though awful, the atrocity of these performances pale in comparison to the sloppy, amateurish rendition of \u201cA Change Is Gonna Come\u201d by Canned Heat. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

With good and bad performances, agreeable and disagreeable dispositions, Woodstock <\/i>is documentary filmmaking at its finest. Even those who are not fans of the music will take something away from this film, for the music merely serves as an accessory. Woodstock <\/i>is both a product of its time, as exemplified by its constant use of split-screen, and an eternal documentation of it. Plus, it poses the question: how often do you need approval from others before you \u201clet it all hang down?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":30004,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5827],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-41634","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-various-artists","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41634"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}