Stay away from this pile of *beep*

Nope, the OP's bashing of Ang Lee's movie is not to take seriously. Please! Enough of these sweeping declarations on a certain movie being the worst ever or statements of the sort. Nobody can take such condemnations seriously when a solid core of viewers speak so highly of a movie with a rating >6-6.5. Inevitably, with a rating within that range, there will be lovers and haters, and the haters often go overboard and throw away any good faith. The best is to ignore them...

... and add to the chorus of those who took a liking of that most honest movie. Simplistic? Yes, often: and there are also what one would call cliches. Yet, Woodstock and 1969 were "far out" much like it is played out in that movie. It may seem cliche to many viewers too young to have a grasp of that era, and yet, the cliches are present but few in numbers. People talked, acted and reacted very much like they are shown to do. On the other hand, Ang Lee introduces scenes that are anachronistic and perhaps only there to please certain agendas? I don't know. Homosexuality, for instance, was only beginning to get accepted, even among the hippies' ranks - who were not a homogeneous population of one mind, far from it, except about heterosexual sex and drugs, notwithstanding what the musical "Hair" meant to say. There was still a strong resistance in all strata of society, and the gay movement would burgeon only in the '70s, snowballing from the Frisco scene. So the openly gay displays, and the ridiculous but endearing transvestite character are there as make-believe but are really atypical. I was similarly surprised at the antisemitic sentiment among these Catskill people. Maybe it's me who is too naive, but it seems out of place and hard to believe to take place in 1969. My only other complaints go to the real cliches of the movie, such as the obligatory straight-young-man-on-his-first-acid-trip-with-the most-iconic-peace-and-love-hippie-couple-you-could-imagine, which, except for the chance to listen to a splendid track by the band Love, is impossibly hackneyed, from the expected vivid color perceptions to Elliot and the young woman bursting in glycerine tears, speechless, at the view of the crowd-ocean. Poetic, but twee, too cutesy and soppy.

But the film works at so many levels and makes for such excellent entertainment that it deserves my warmest recommendations. Maybe it's a lot of nostalgia on my part, but I truly believed in the depiction of the era. A movie that manages to portray the accurate zeitgeist of an event of the magnitude of the Woodstock festival - yes, Yasgur's Farm and White Lake ("Woodstock" (NY), which as we know is nowhere nearby and was abandoned in favor of White Lake)were the center of the universe during 3 days - deserves our highest praise. Ang Lee painstakingly reconstituted memorable scenes (again, these could be called cliches by the haters, but these events and scenes are real ones, as captured in the well-known 1970 documentary)- the mudslide, the rain dance, the various political classes and booths, the nuns cheered by the crowd and the Port-O-San worker). Even the toxic desolation left in Yasgur's farmland after the festival, with the virtual landfill created by the masses piled in the rain-drenched place, is spot on and contributes to making us believe in the movie.

Quite another accomplishment by Ang Lee, which is mainly to be appreciated at its entertainment value and as a fictionalized take on a historic event, which rings true to the actual Woodstock Festival.