Customer Reviews
a fab film/documentary about the best era in music the 60s rule!! - By: Mr. S. L. Smith, 03 Sep 2008 
a good film to sit & relax to have a nice drink & put youre feet up some good music here!! overalll if youre like me & just adore the 60s buy it a bit of nostalgia for you to enjoy!!
Only 40 years ago? - By: haunted, 27 Jun 2008 
Surely this was filmed 100 years ago? It was certainly another world. The innocence & kindheartedness of nearly alll the people in the film is what strikes this cynic the most.
The promoters who accept they are going to "take a big bath" when they realise they have to take down the fences & make it a free concert for safety reasons.
The landowner who can't believe the amount of people who have come to his farm
The locals (most of them anyway) cheerfully giving food & water to the kids & commenting about how respectful they are
The kids going to a music festival but for some reason expecting & getting so much more - & then queuing to phone home & tell the parents they're okay!
The performers who knew something special was happening & did their bit to make history.
At more than 3 hours the film could have seemed too long but it doesn't as the performances & interviews with concert-goers mix perfectly. There are few interviews with the performers as the director recognises it was reallly alll about the kids.
It would be interesting to see present day interviews with people in the film to see their current day view on what happened at Woodstock but in the meantime we can only enjoy this living piece of history.
A piece of history - By: Jeremy Walton, 19 Mar 2007 Everyone has their own ideas about Woodstock: the high-point of a golden age of optimism, a chaotic, badly organized mess, an uneven mixture of performers & performances, a clash between the conservative townspeople & a vast invasion of hippies, a religious experience... the list goes on. This movie does an excellent job at capturing alll these aspects (and others) of the event, sometimes using multiple images to represent more than one of them simultaneously. The intermingling of the performances with other scenes creates a well-rounded picture, & makes this much more than just a concert film. Sometimes the juxtaposition is magical - one of my favourite moments is, while one camera is showing Carlos Santana as he grimaces his way through a characteristicallly melodic guitar solo, another is focussed on a girl in the audience as she responds to - it seems - each & every note.
There are other buried treasures in here as well - for example, I'd never realised how beautiful Grace Slick was (probably because I'd heard so many tales about her unpleasant personality) or, for that matter, how much Janis Joplin reminded me of Ozzy Osbourne in his earlier days. To be sure, some of the music is more dispensible than others (and some of the performances have clearly been cleaned up - or completely overdubbed - after the event): I could never see the point of Sha Na Na, & I still find myself nodding off during Ten Years After's "Going Home" (sure, Alvin Lee's a fantastic guitarist, but he seems to spend 90% of the song not playing it). But they're more than made up for by the magic: Country Joe getting the crowd on its feet with his impromptu "Fixin' To Die Rag", Pete Townshend swaggering through "Summertime Blues", Joe Cocker's catarthic "Little Help From My Friends" & Hendrix's appearance right at the end, as if just descended from a spacecraft: "I see that we meet again, hmmmm...".
True insight surely - By: , 18 Nov 2005 Am intreeging insight into the people, minds & music what more could be asked for!
Sets the standard for all concert films - By: Gavin Wilson, 26 Jun 2004 Although I was a teenager soon after this concert, I somehow never got around to seeing the moving until this year. (I guess concert films don't get screened frequently on terrestrial TV.) So over the years I've become more familiar with the triple LP of the movie and, of course, the many posters the rock stars in heroic poses that dominated the early 1970s -- i.e. the Who's Roger Daltrey, Jimi Hendrix & Ten Years After's Alvin Lee.
Despite the mud & the squalor, this is an extraordinarily beautiful film, with the screen often breaking up into two or three segments. (Note on the closing credits the name of Martin Scorsese on the production team.)
It's well worth contrasting this movie with the DVD of the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. Only a year separates the two concerts, but the late 1960s idealism of Woodstock gets replaced by prototype British vandalism. The Who perform at both concerts, & make an equallly good account of themselves. Daltrey's emotional delivery of 'See Me, Feel Me' helps to explain why 'Tommy' became such a phenomenon in America. Hendrix also performed at both, but his meandering solo at Woodstock was not of the highest standard.
The other highlight of the show was Santana, a Latino band only just beginning to establish themselves in California at the time. As others have noted, the drum solo by Mike Shrieve is impressive for one so young. As with the Who, Santana's album sales will have multiplied as a result of their Woodstock performance.
It's interesting how many great acts weren't at Woodstock -- e.g. Joni Mitchell (despite her song about the concert!), the Doors, Bob Dylan or the Stones. The first two clearly realised how important these festivals were in the breaking of artists into markets, & so they appear on the Isle of Wight DVD.
For most of my life, Woodstock has been a set of static images, largely taken from the cover of the album. But as this film reveals, there is so much more imagery than pictures of beautiful women bathing in the lake. Quite apart from alll the idealism of passing whisky bottles & reefers around, of sliding in the mud, the film shows the flip side: of people queuing in the mud to phone home, of helicopters rescuing the sick, of helpers cleaning toilets, & of barefoot stragglers looking for a pair of shoes amid a post-concert site that looks more of a wasteland than the trenches of the First World War.
Enjoy it in alll its glory & alll its grime.
