Word: concert
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...curious, the number of people who bemoan Hong Kong's independent-music scene. Critics (and expats in town for brief, superficial sojourns) adopt a default posture of digit-pointing, waving jaded index fingers at a concert calendar crammed with Cantopop and mainstream international acts. But even the most cursory probing reveals plenty of homegrown edge. Consider the Underground, a fortnightly indie-music night that takes place in venues across town, whose organizers have showcased more than 300 bands in its five years of existence. That's irrefutable evidence that if you're looking to tap into live, original music...
...walked on the moon. Three weekends later, about a half-million people attended, or tried to attend, the Woodstock music festival - three days of peace, love and music that still stand as an emblem for all that was groovy and messy about the late '60s. In anticipation of the concert's 40th anniversary, Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock documentary was released in a director's cut on DVD and Blu-ray. And on Aug. 14, a day before the exact anniversary, Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock opened in U.S. theaters, although it had its world premiere weeks prior at Cannes...
...into Ed Sullivan's theater to see the Beatles) or Love Field (Diane Lane as a JFK fan in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963). Lee's film is screenwriter-producer James Schamus' adaptation of Elliot Tiber's reminiscence about his small but crucial role in bringing the mammoth concert to his hometown...
...actors crawl out of the rubble. Give Jonathan Groff (a major new cutie) a hand for turning the Woodstock weekend's chief promoter, Michael Lang, into a figure so charismatic, and so central to the actual concert, that viewers will think the movie should have been about him. Liev Schreiber also earns credit for not being buried under the stereotype of a muscular cross-dresser who serves as Elliot's security chief. The vaunted Broadway actor shows something we hadn't seen before: nice legs...
...rest of the movie is a mess - Lee's first total miscalculation, his first wholly inessential film. He'll do better; he almost has to. The rest of us with any interest in a 40-year-old rock concert can get the DVD of Woodstock, and maybe sing along to a new version of Joni Mitchell's tune...