Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

DKosty123 This is the ultimate hippie heaven. A concert that had paying customers until they break down the gates and overwhelm the system is symbolic here of what this concert film is. 9 Months after this concert, I think there was a group of babies born because the number of women running around naked at this concert is still a world record. There is love, mellow drug use, and lots going on. I am not sure how these 3 days were edited down to 3 hours, but I doubt that any footage that did not make the film is any different than what did.The biggest band here from concerts previous to this one is Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. While these 4 were together, they were at the top. After Neil Young left the group, there would be rumors at every CSN concert that Young would join them. It still has never happened, though CSN has done pretty well without Young. Woodstock has tracks from the group with Young, though it was only their second concert as a group. The rest of the line up here is a rock hall of fame. Some of the best musical acts of the era played at Woodstock, including Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Band, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, Ten Years After, Joan Baez, Santana, Joe Cocker, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. All that is missing are the Rolling Stones and Beatles. The whole line-up- 1 Friday, August 15 to Saturday, August 16 1.1 Richie Havens 1.2 Swami Satchidananda 1.3 Sweetwater 1.4 Bert Sommer 1.5 Tim Hardin 1.6 Ravi Shankar 1.7 Melanie Safka 1.8 Arlo Guthrie 1.9 Joan Baez 2 Saturday, August 16 to Sunday, August 17 2.1 Quill 2.2 Country Joe McDonald 2.3 Santana 2.4 John B. Sebastian 2.5 Keef Hartley Band 2.6 The Incredible String Band 2.7 Canned Heat 2.8 Mountain 2.9 Grateful Dead 2.10 Creedence Clearwater Revival 2.11 Janis Joplin 2.12 Sly & the Family Stone 2.13 The Who 2.14 Jefferson Airplane 3 Sunday, August 17 to Monday, August 18 3.1 Joe Cocker 3.2 Country Joe and the Fish 3.3 Ten Years After 3.4 The Band 3.5 Johnny Winter 3.6 Blood, Sweat & Tears 3.7 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young 3.8 Paul Butterfield Blues Band 3.9 Sha Na Na 3.10 Jimi HendrixThree Days, three nights, history made. The crowd got larger and larger as the legends played. When the concert ended, the resulting traffic jam leaving forced New York State to open a brand new interstate route 17, before it was completed, to relieve the congestion. So many people had come in, the existing roads could not handle the exit traffic.Hendrix closing this concert was incredible. There was a hope for world peace at this concert that never quite came off. In fact, it is more distant today then it ever was then. When Vietnam ended, it seemed like peace had come at last. This concert was the intersection of sexual freedom, peace, and mellow drugs. All of these went off the deep end after it. The hard part for today's young viewers is understanding how this feeling existed, and why it went away in the years after? Almost 50 years later, and a lot of this is fading. The good thing is this film proves it existed. The bad thing is every thing that happened after it has been down hill from the top of the peace movement represented here.

SnoopyStyle This is a documentary of the iconic 1969 three-day music festival in upstate New York. The use of the split screen is interesting. It gives the movie a sense of chaos and energy. The performances are iconic to say the least. It is a little funny to follow Sha Na Na with Joe Cocker. The cheesiness of the choreographed dancing clash decisively with the raw power of Cocker. The music is generally great, raw, and close-up. There are some other scenes like the yoga class that breaks up the movie and gives it some fun. It's also gets full marks for being a time capsule of that landmark event. It does run long but it was quite an event.

gilligan1965 The reason I chose this title for my review is so that others don't make the same mistake I did years ago and miss-out on about 2 hours of this movie. "American Movie Classics"...not quite! Any self-proclaimed "classic" channel that censors an American Classic is hypocritical. Kinda-like the Nazis burning books - 'you can read and see this...but, not this!?!?'Back in the summer of 2000, I was so excited that "Woodstock" was going to be shown on the American Movie Classics (AMC) channel that afternoon.I hadn't seen this movie for many years before that and planned on making a VHS recording of it.Anyhow...I watched that recording many times over the next fifteen years until I saw "Woodstock" on the IndiePlex channel this month (September 2015).I'll never watch the 'edited' version of this movie again! I never even realized that I'd recorded a watered-down version of this since I hadn't seen the unedited version in decades (around 1976, I believe!?!?).To say the very least...the unedited version is excellent! This movie (Rockumentary) isn't just about the music or the musicians, it's about an entire generational subculture of people who were, for the most part, on their way out in many ways...some good, some bad. For many of them, it was their last hoorah before the 1960s ended...and, what a hoorah it was!I've always loved concerts. I've been to many in my youth, and, have many on VHS and DVD. However, to me, "Woodstock" (1969) is by far the best because it's not 'only' a concert...it's a major event that defined much of the 1960s!In retrospect...imagine if 'everyone' invited to perform at "Woodstock" actually showed up (The Beatles; The Rolling Stones; The Doors; Led Zeppelin; Jethro Tull; Iron Butterfly; The Moody Blues; Chicago; and, so many more)!?!? They could have made it into a mini-series! :)

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU This four DVD collection is essential: the director's cut of the film, one DVD of extra music and one DVD of interviews. This last DVD is interesting for the technical details and all the material conditions. It is anecdotal and somewhere it misses the essential point: the music – as a representative of the world – of the twentieth century has been through a revolution and Woodstock is the first demonstration (like in science and mathematics) of the total jump of the whites in America, slightly after the British and the Europeans, into endorsing that new music. To find what is so original in that new music is not that difficult today if we have followed the vast research in the whole world about music all along human history. Listen to the DVDs or to the CDs and you will find out that this music has one characteristic that unifies all the styles or nearly: it is polyrhythmic. It is so obvious that discussing the point is pointless. Back in Europe and in the 20s and 30s there had been some attempts in "classical" or "symphonic" music to produce polyrhythmia but it had failed to conquer the vast popular public. Popular music was entirely locked up in good old songs and good old monorhythmia. What is polyrhythmia that Mr. Word's Dictionary refuses? It is the fact that a superficial and traditional rhythmic line, generally binary or ternary, covers up and is articulated upon a far faster rhythmic line that can run in multiples of two or three. That faster rhythm can be carried by the modern drums (where do they come from?) or contained in the singing or in the melodious line of one particular instrument, the bass or the lead guitar used as a rhythmic accompaniment. That was invented in the United States of America and was the consequence of a social, political and geo-demographic phenomenon known as the slave trade and slavery. In Africa, music is originally polyrhythmic and the instruments they used are drums and percussions of many very different types from the tam-tam to the water drum. The slower rhythm is the one to which most people dance and the faster rhythm is magic in a way since it can lead to a trance, to vodun (or voodoo) illumination, with or without the help of alcohol or other substances. The Blacks arrived in America and kept their rhythm, their music and used it all the time in the fields. That will produce black music whose first fully developed form will be jazz. Jazz will become a hit thanks to the radio but jazz requires a new instrument, the modern drums of our bands. They more or less took all the instruments from the European tradition and just associated them so that one person could use both hands and both feet to create a rhythmic universe that was by definition polyrhythmic. From Jazz to rock and roll and modern popular music there is only about twenty to thirty years. The radio will make it popular everywhere in the world, would I say, and then television added its own two bits. The whites learned it and started producing their own, the British being ahead with the first bands that managed to move vast audiences and to spread everywhere in the world. The Americans were just going to follow that road. Woodstock is the first time in American history that such a mass of essentially white people gathered to listen to that kind of music, white, black or latino musicians together. That music is polyrhythmic and that creates a mental way of thinking that is interesting. The brain can naturally think and work along several lines at the same time, but if you make it a requirement, a style, a way of thinking it clearly implies people who are different can dance together, can mix and be together. That music is mentally, psychologically, and even psychically multiple and if two, three or four rhythms can live together why should we segregate among people any group as opposed to another, even any gender as opposed to the others. Equality in total diversity, guaranteed diversity in the very recognition of the differences of the others and the particularity of myself as not opposed, not compared but simply contrasted to the others. The world was becoming a symphony of all kinds of things and in the human sphere anything that appeared as a limit was to be gotten rid of. Even grammar for some was fascist. Good riddance. Every single particularity I decided for myself or I assume in myself became a choice and implied that I was myself and unique and that all other human beings around me were themselves and unique and that we could all live in total peace and fraternity or brotherhood or sisterhood or sorority by assuming all these differences and by letting them come to the surface of our life, to the conscience of our brains, to the reality of our existence. The First amendment became the central axle of this new world perfectly in phase and harmony with that polyrhythmic music I am talking of. In other words this polyrhythmic vision is the direct production and embodiment of that first amendment. It became the music of the people for the people by the people. We were leaving Gettysburg behind in history and making it into our flag, banner, motto, ethics. Are we conscious of what I am explaining? Of course not, otherwise I would not have to explain all that. So celebrate Woodstock as the turning point in human history that would never have been possible without the bringing of millions of black Africans to America, even if that was a crime against humanity, and without the globalization that started as soon as Auschwitz was liberated, quite a few years ago.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID