Woodstock (1970)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) In the Summer of 1969 historical face-off, I’m more of a moon landing guy than a Woodstock one, but even I’ll have to admit that the concert had better music. The massive documentary Woodstock is about as close as I’ll ever want to get to spending three days in a muddy field listening to music. At 185 minutes (or a massive 224 minutes for the director’s cut), it has a lot of material to present in between thirty musical acts, footage of the 400,000 people that were present for the event, and interviews with bemused locals talking about the hippie invasion of their quiet rural town. But anything that’s not the music is a distraction: the performance footage is the heart of the film. Woodstock was almost never made—according to legend, director Michael Wadleigh decided at the last minute to send a filming crew to upstate New York, and captured so much footage that it took months and a team of editors (including Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker) to wrestle it all into the final result—and that’s with the split-panel presentation to show as much footage as possible. It’s quite a movie, even if you have to set aside most of an evening to watch it all. For those who weren’t even alive in 1969, Woodstock is also a wonderful time capsule of an event unlikely to ever happen again.