Woodstock Not Worth the Trip

Taking Woodstock isn’t really about the music: it’s more about coming of age on the outskirts of the festival. Critics are lukewarm about Ang Lee's latest effort:

• “You can’t deny the smiling mood that wafts through the film like incense,” admits Anthony Lane of the New Yorker, “and to that extent it honors the original three days; but not once does a character’s show of feeling stir you, send you, or stop you in your tracks.”

• Stephen Holden of the New York Times calls the “likable, humane” film “a gentle, meandering celebration of personal liberation at a moment when rigid social barriers were becoming more permeable.”
• “All the tie-dye, reefer, skinny-dipping, split-screen cinematography and acid-trip psychedelics can't make up for the film's major sin of omission: the music,” Peter Travers writes for Rolling Stone.

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