Woodstock

Posted on August 24, 2009 at 8:00 am

A
Lowest Recommended Age: Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating: Rated R for drug content, nudity and language
Profanity: Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drug use, drug references
Violence/ Scariness: None
Diversity Issues: Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters: 1970
Date Released to DVD: August 25, 2009
Amazon.com ASIN: B001NXDSLQ

Forty years ago, it seemed for one brief moment as though a disastrous, mud-soaked music festival that attracted so many people it had a larger population than all but one city in the state could be the beginning of a new world of peace and cooperation. That dream was quickly battered but still lives on in the magic that its name and its songs still evoke: Woodstock. This week, a new movie from Ang Lee covers the impact of the festival on the community that was its not-entirely-welcoming host. But the truly indispensible memento of the three days of peace and music is the award-winning original documentary from director Michael Wadleigh. A new 40th-anniversary edition is being released this week with additional footage from from Paul Butterfield, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, Johnny Winter & Mountain and interviews from participants including Wadleigh and concert producer Michael Lang. Whether you remember the warning about the brown acid and the interview with the porta-john guy and the nun flashing the peace sign or whether you have yet to experience the “Fixin’ to Die” rag or Hendrix’s stunning “Star Spangled Banner,” this is a brilliant film about an extraordinary moment.

Related Tags:

 

Documentary DVD/Blu-Ray Pick of the Week Music

X Games 3D: The Movie

Posted on August 20, 2009 at 5:58 pm

B
Lowest Recommended Age: 4th - 6th Grades
MPAA Rating: Rated PG for extreme sports action and accidents
Profanity: None
Alcohol/ Drugs: None
Violence/ Scariness: Intense sports action and accidents, reference to serious injuries
Diversity Issues: None
Date Released to Theaters: August 21, 2009

Kids, don’t try this at home.

3D is X-treme film-making and thus well suited to the X Games, hyper-intense, hyper-dangerous, hyper-what are they thinking? sports that are closer to stunts. Young men compete on skateboard, snowboard, and on dirt bikes and motocross to defy the laws of physics. One of them says he feels about gravity the way some people feel about evolution: “It’s just a theory.”

Adolescent testosterone-friendly sponsors like Play Station, Taco Bell, Red Bull, and the Navy have helped make the X Games into an enormous and high-stakes event. Some of its most stunning images are of the homes these young men have purchased with the money they make breaking their bones to do these tricks.

And X can also stand for something else. At one point, a selection of one competitor’s past x-rays of injuries flash on the screen.

The stunts are astonishing and the 3D effects are so intense that you will feel like wiping the dirt kicked up by the motocross bike off your face. But there is more to the film. It has some important lessons about passion, commitment, being willing to ask “what if it is possible?” and being willing to fail in order to achieve ultimate success. The climax of the film comes in a three-way competition that includes one man coming back from a wipe-out the year before and one who is badly injured early on and insists on continuing to compete. The respect and affection between the competitors is genuinely touching and the way they ride their boards back and forth to the medical facility to check on the injured athlete is affecting. They are barely aware of how organic their attachment to the boards has become.

Related Tags:

 

3D Action/Adventure Documentary Movies -- format Sports

Remembering Robert McNamera

Posted on July 6, 2009 at 10:02 pm

Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera, the architect of the Viet Nam war, died today, still a figure of controversy after nearly half a century. Every family should watch the Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War for a thought-provoking (and often just provoking) look at the way people of the greatest possible intelligence, experience, and good intentions, can make decisions with terrible consequences. The parallels to contemporary challenges are undeniable.

Related Tags:

 

Biography Documentary

Gertrude Berg, Television Pioneer

Posted on July 3, 2009 at 3:58 pm

A forthcoming book and documentary about Gertrude Berg tell the story of this pioneering broadcaster, producer, and actress. According to a story in Flow Magazine,

Gertrude Berg was the founder of the family situation comedy on radio and television. She was Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz rolled into one, a business genius and negotiator as well as performer, writer, director and auteur of her own show — and this during an era when women in up-front power positions were rare. She was known as “Molly Goldberg” on her show The Goldbergs, which ran from 1929-49 on radio and from 1949-56 on television. Kempner’s film gives a fascinating multi-sided portrait of Gertrude Berg, the demons that drove her and the undeniable imagination and talent that made her such a prolific writer-producer and star of early television. Gertrude Berg had extraordinary powers of observation, love for her grandparents’ generation, and an innate drive to write and perform evident from her teenage years when she entertained the children of guests at her father’s Catskills hotel.

Berg came from the vaudeville-era tradition of ethnic comedy, but she avoided caricature and created a warm and affectionate portrait of a three-generation Jewish family living in the Bronx.

On one side of Molly Goldberg and her husband Jake was the first-generation “Uncle David,” with the characteristic shrug of the shoulders and Yiddish theater inflection that made him endearing. On the other side were the third-generation “kids” who were becoming fully American. But it was Molly Goldberg herself, placed squarely in the middle, still speaking the Yiddish-inflected language of the Bronx when she moved to the suburbs years later, who created the central vitality of the show as she opened it each week from her window in the Bronx.

In an era when women and Jews were seldom given opportunities in business of any kind and almost never in television, Berg was so successful that her radio program was broadcast simultaneously on all three networks. Kempner’s new documentary bills itself as the story of “The most famous woman in America that you never heard of.” Kempner, the creator of the award-winning 1998 documentary about Hank Greenberg, is the ideal film-maker to tell this story and I look forward to seeing it when it opens later this month.

Related Tags:

 

Documentary Television Trailers, Previews, and Clips
THE MOVIE MOM® is a registered trademark of Nell Minow. Use of the mark without express consent from Nell Minow constitutes trademark infringement and unfair competition in violation of federal and state laws. All material © Nell Minow 1995-2024, all rights reserved, and no use or republication is permitted without explicit permission. This site hosts Nell Minow’s Movie Mom® archive, with material that originally appeared on Yahoo! Movies, Beliefnet, and other sources. Much of her new material can be found at Rogerebert.com, Huffington Post, and WheretoWatch. Her books include The Movie Mom’s Guide to Family Movies and 101 Must-See Movie Moments, and she can be heard each week on radio stations across the country.

Website Designed by Max LaZebnik