Halloween 2 opens today, Aug. 28. Checking my calendar just to make sure I didn’t need a costume, that’s two months too early. But, according to Miramax, it’s good business: Halloween H20 and Rob Zombie’s reboot opened to big numbers in August. Relieved that I don’t have to cut holes in a sheet to dress up like a ghost, I’ll roll with that.
What, though, was Focus Features smoking when it decided to open Taking Woodstock two weeks after the 40th commemoration of the actual event? Maybe I’m wrong, yet I’d say the buzz has faded, man. Or what buzz there was—due to a combination of our fragmented media culture and my lack of much media at all while on vacation earlier this month, I pretty much missed it. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, and the main stage was crowded with other golden oldies from the summer of 1969, among them the moon landing, the Manson murders and Chappaquiddick, which has been churning up headlines again. Director Ang Lee and writer and co-producer James Schamus, the co-president of Focus, aren’t quite striking while the iron is white-hot.
Then again, the film is more Woodstock-ish than Woodstock, a pot brownie with some Capra corn mixed in. My memories are purple hazy, but I recall sitting through Woodstock the documentary once, perking up for the best bits. (Last man on Earth Charlton Heston, an unlikely viewer even under the entertainment-deprived circumstances, sat through it hundreds of times in 1971’s The Omega Man.) Taking Woodstock, a sort of making-of the event, is the same way, though the choice moments are few. Most of them come from the real-life anecdotes sprinkled in: the organizers ordering lots of brown rice to “keep the hippies from shitting in the fields,” or the mild electrification of metal surfaces after a lightning storm, which crimped the performance schedule. It’s the fact-based stuff that’s a bummer. (more…)
Milk (2009, Focus Features/Universal)