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Jul 21, 2015Matt_07_1998 rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
Taking Woodstock is a film based off of the real events that took place leading up to as well as during the 3 day event that would result in history being made, "Three days of peace and music" the slogan for the legendary concert in 1969, Woodstock. The film kicks off with the main character, Elliot Tiber who is an interior designer moving back to live with his parents due to their struggles with maintaining and running their run down motel. The motel is placed in what seems like the middle of nowhere, which happens to be White Lake, New York. Along the tough road of assisting his parents with the motel management, Elliot comes across a newspaper article which headline's discusses the cancellation of the original concert. Elliot takes the opportunity upon himself with the idea of a quick cash situation to help his parents' struggling motel business. He then calls up the group of individuals who were planning on running the original festival and attempts to convince them into using their land and allowing their motel business to help cater the festival. They provided their almost always vacant rooms, and used all of their resources to help host the festival. The legendary story of Woodstock is very well-known so I won't spoil the rest of the movie by reliving the tail while diving into detail. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and thought many parts of it were well executed, while there were without a doubt a handful of roll your eyes, cheesy moments present every so often in the film I couldn't help but temporarily forget about those poorly executed and scripted moments when seeing the entire creation of the festival unfold. The movie did extremely well at teleporting the viewer back to August 1969 as soon as the film fades in. The movie also does extremely well at making the viewer almost forget they are watching a movie, but rather they are a part of the crew putting together this insane three-day concert of a lifetime. Then once the concert finally gets underway we unfortunately (just like the main character and his family) barely even get a chance to experience the concert at all. All in all this movie makes me happy when I watch it, although the first ten minutes are kind of slow starting off, but this film makes me wish I could've experienced this amazing event in history, unfortunately I'm only 17 years of old so It was not possible. If you are the type of person who does not want anything to do at all with psychedelic substances; do not really share an interest for the hippie culture; or just do not have an interest for historical based movies, I cannot say that I would recommend this film. However if you are more accepting of the hippie culture and all the things that came/come with it; share an interest in older music; and share an interest or a passion for historical events such as Woodstock I would highly recommend experiencing this movie at least once. However I would like to put out a quick disclaimer as well as the biggest problem I had with this movie, and that is the entire film was based around the making/set up of Woodstock as well as a bit of the hippie culture, rather than being based around the music and the performances and performers there. I would rate Taking Woodstock a 7.5/10, and I would definitely like to see it again! Rest in peace to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Richie Havens [my 3 favourite performers at Woodstock ('3 Days of Peace and Music')].