'Taking Woodstock': An Ang Lee Comedy?
Filed under: Comedy, Focus Features, Trailers and Clips
When I last posted about Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, I called it a "gay-themed project" and speculated that the film might be about how the main character's involvement in Woodstock "served as redemption for giving up his own artistic ambitions and living most of his life in the closet." Now that I've seen the trailer, which you can watch below, that pompous description seems laughably wrong-headed. This won't just be "lighter" than much of Lee's previous work, as I also wrote; it's a full-on slapstick comedy, complete with a classic underdog storyline, and showdowns between hippies and uptight old fogeys.Mainstream comedies tend to be under-directed. Even the Team Apatow films, while generally outstanding, don't exactly distinguish themselves formally or stylistically. But Lee is so damn deliberate and meticulous, with every shot and every cut calculated just so, that I'm really curious to see how he handles something this lightweight and apparently raucous. It certainly looks like a new Ang Lee mode; his last film that could be called a comedy was 1993's wistful Eat Drink Man Woman, and Woodstock seems to be worlds away from that film. Before that, Lee made a Taiwanese film called The Wedding Banquet that sounds like it might be closer, but I haven't seen it.
Anyway, I think Demetri Martin, who stars and introduces the trailer, is an extraordinarily funny guy (anyone seen his show on Comedy Central?), and how awesome is it to see someone other than Christopher Guest cast Eugene Levy in an actual movie as opposed to the latest direct-to-DVD American Pie "sequel"? This looks like fun; it's set to be released August 14th.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-26-2009 @ 12:17PM
Anthony said...
Folks should definitely read Elliot Tiber's memoir TAKING WOODSTOCK before they see the movie this summer - it's a real trip, and an amazing tale of how a closeted gay man became involved in one of the biggest happenings of the Sixties . . . and how that experienced emboldened and strengthened him.
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3-26-2009 @ 12:44PM
Germain said...
I saw this movie in a test screening about a month ago.
It's not a full on comedy. And it's not a major gay themed project. It's not even melodramatic. It's sort of all of these things at once and that's the problem.
I mean, at its heart, it's just the story of how one man unknowingly put his hand on history. Around that, there's sort of a ton of things going on and the movie come out very uneven. It wants to tell the story, it wants to be funny, it wants to be a tribute, and by attempting to be all of these things, it fails at each of them.
Again, this was a test screening so hopefully Ang will change some of these things, but, I just wanted to clarify that the film IS an Ang Lee movie, just an uneven one, and not and out and out comedy.
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3-26-2009 @ 1:00PM
Kate said...
I'm pretty happy about this. The first Ang Lee film I saw was Eat Drink Man Woman, which is now one of my favorite films. I've also seen the Wedding Banquet, which is similarly toned--culture clash takes the place of generation clash, but big families, traditions and a colorful cast of characters all come together in that one to make a funny and yet touching story.
I think Ang Lee has some powerful storytelling chops in comedy and drama, and I hope he does even out the bumps that Germain references before release, because this has the potential to be a very enjoyable film.
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