Word: woodstock
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DIRECTOR Michael Wadleigh has insisted time and again that he retained total control over Woodstock. New if the people who write about movies in this country knew anything about them, he wouldn't dare make that admission: but as it is, the Woodstock movie is being hailed as imaginative movie-making. It's not: it's poorly shot, clumsily edited, has no new ideas about the event, nor any on how the event should be presented. If you were at Woodstock, you'll know the film for a shuck: if not, you'll suspect...
...Woodstock's most obvious attraction is the music, and rock has never sounded -or looked-better than it does in the movie. "Hold on to your neighbor," says an onstage announcer at one point early in the proceedings, and moviegoers should be sure to take the same precautions. The sound track comes rushing out of a four-track stereo system that manages to give the exhilarating sensation of total immersion in sound. Joe Cocker gives a gutsy, driving interpretation of the Beatles' With a Little Help from My Friends. Performing part of the rock opera Tommy, Peter Townshend...
Sinuous Color. Wadleigh is equally successful at conveying the sociological aspects of the event through concise interviews with townspeople, festival organizers, police and members of the audience. Everyone from a chief of police to a maintenance man for the Port-O-San portable toilet corporation gets his say. Woodstock, however, is not an unrelieved celebration. For every shot of easy affection in the grass and innocent group bathing in the nude, there is a scene in the medical tent, or the ominous voice of the onstage announcers: "The word is that some of the brown acid being passed around...
...technical expertise used to achieve Woodstock's pulsating, visceral effects should stand as a model of non-fiction film making. Particularly outstanding are the sinuous color photography (a good deal of it done by Wadleigh himself) and the editing by T. Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese-a masterly combination of taste, timing and theatrics. There are sequences -such as one in which John Sebastian dedicates a song to a girl who has just given birth-of lilting simplicity. There is the hysteria of The Who and the pure rhythmic orgasm of Ten Years After. They all help to make Woodstock...
...Presumably because of some nudity and some rather raucous language, Jack Valenti's industry watchdogs have awarded Woodstock an R rating. Besides giving the whole thing a slightly salacious air, this means in effect that many young people who attended the festival cannot go to the movie without their parents...