10 Thursday, September 3, 2009
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
The Crimson White
‘Taking Woodstock’ unfocused, uneven By Peterson Hill Staff Writer
Ang Lee has made a career of making films that are vastly different from each other. His latest, “Taking Woodstock,” is no exception. To be up front, this film doesn’t reach the heights of his beautiful “Brokeback Mountain,” or his charming “Sense and Sensibility,” but I don’t think he was going for that. He is telling a story that is as scatterbrained as the participants of the festival. However, the story centers on the Teichbergs and their son Elliot (Demetri Martin). These are undoubtedly some of the most interesting scenes of the film. Elliot concocts the plan to have the festival of Woodstock in Bethel after it has been kicked out of two towns already. The locals of the town aren’t happy, but Elliot sees a buck to be made and he capitalizes on it. Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy) sees the same dollar signs flashing so he offers his farm up for them to use. The community ostracizes both men for letting the hippies take over their small, quiet town. As the hippies start to roll in, the stress begins to pile up for Elliot. He is swamped by everything he needs to do around his family’s motel, the El Monaco. His mother Sonia (Imelda Staunton) greets the money with wide eyes, but when the work starts to pile up, she can’t take it and fully blames her son. His father Jake (Henry Goodman) starts out hesitant but grows to see the beauty of the event. There is, of course, a colorful array of characters that begin to populate Bethel. Perhaps the most interesting is Vilma (Liev Schreiber) who is a transvestite ex-marine that
‘TAKING WOODSTOCK’ Runtime: 120 minutes MPAA rating: PG-13 Release date: Aug. 28 CW critic’s rating:
Bottom line: Ang Lee is a good director, but there’s just too much going on in “Taking Woodstock.”
offers up her services to the Teichbergs to help keep security under control. Schreiber, who doesn’t get enough work as it is, truly shines in a small but memorable role. Also, Billy (Emile Hirsch) is a shell-shocked soldier from Vietnam. Billy is never constant though. At the beginning he is struggling with reality; at the end he seems fine. He was given no room to grow though. We don’t spend enough time with him. I could continue on about the characters, but there are a good dozen more, from an unneeded contemporary nudist theatre troupe to two people who offer Elliot acid. There is just too much here. Lee is working on a script from James Schamus’ interpretation of Elliot Tiber’s book that tries to encompass every piece of Woodstock. The film starts small and almost ends small until the last shot. Yes, the festival was massive and there were several hundreds of thousands of people there. Lee does something
rottentomatoes.com Kelli Garner (left), Paul Dano (center) and Demetri Martin (right) star in Academy Award-winning director Ang Leeʼs “Taking Woodstock,” a film depicting the seminal music event. smart by making the film a way that all the strings got put into place. There is actually never any concert footage. We hear it, but the film isn’t about the music. Above all the film is a coming-of-age story for Elliot. The problem is that he never really comes of age. He is no closer to telling his father at the end of the film that he is a homos exual than he is at the beginning. Elliot takes acid and he sees
Maea: fancy and pricey By Sean Randall Staff Writer
Last year, I sought out all the meal-plan-compatible dining areas on campus and tried to rate them, just as a normal student going about his day. I found out, however, that Bama Dining decided to surprise me and many others by replacing the Lakeside Diner with a new restaurant called Maea, open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday, 5 to 10 p.m. Saturday and 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday. You’ve probably already heard about it one way or another. I first heard of it when I was invited to a “Boycott Maea” Facebook group. Some people obviously are not happy with it, but others seem to be OK with it. I decided to check it out before I joined any boycotts. When you first take a look at Maea, you’ll notice they’re definitely branding themselves as a “fancy, sit-down restaurant.” You’ve got your Maître d’, nice tablecloths, well-dressed servers and even the tiny menus that note prices with a single letter. When you get an entrée, often there’s an ornamental, indiscernible squiggle of fancy. Getting a sandwich means getting a pile of shoestring fries. The food comes out somewhat decorative and, fortunately, also tastes pretty good. They have a decent range of food styles from steaks to poboys, nachos to burgers and noodles to fried green tomatoes. There are appetizers, salads, sandwiches, entrées and three desserts to choose from. I feel safe in saying, as a restaurant, the food they serve is a cut above anything else on campus and is worth a try. But, to be honest, that’s the best praise I can give it. Its atmosphere is a bit awkward, as you have a fancy meal in front of you and a bird’s eye view of the clamor and bustle of Lakeside Dining Hall. The noise carries a bit, so the lessthan-fancy setting offsets the fancy food. While I can understand some hiccups with it being a new facility, the service seems a little iffy at times. While they often have no more than five or six people eating at once, it seems that if they have
any more than ten, they’re swamped. It took quite a bit of time there to get any refills on drink, and I overheard they had already run out of noodles, only an hour or so after opening. Not terribly prepared, in my opinion. A friend of mine told me getting condiments like dressing for salads took a lot longer than it should have, and having the waiter stand over you while you fill out the tip on your check is a bit unnerving. Which brings me to cost. Maea takes Dining Dollars and Bama Cash, and you’d better have a good amount of both if you want to eat there. I’ve eaten there four times and found myself down by about $85 in Dining Dollars. Appetizers run from $4 to $8. Salads go from $5 to $9. Sandwiches are between $7 and $9. Entrées have three prices: $9, $12 and $14, and the three desserts are $4, $5 and $6. Want to add chicken to your salad? That’s $2 extra. Shrimp: $5. I’m not sure how much drinks cost since I always stuck with water, but once you add tax and throw in that line on your check labeled “Gratuity,” you’re probably looking at a $15-plus meal, and students often aren’t rolling in dough — especially dough made out of Dining Dollars. For the student with a limited budget, this is a once-everymonth-or-two deal, in my opinion. Now, all this is tolerable, I suppose. There are a lot of fancier restaurants I don’t go to terribly often due to expense. But the introduction of Maea
has more problems than just being expensive. First, it took out Lakeside Diner. Now that it is gone, Bama Dining has opened up Lakeside Dining Hall from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. with grill style food every Sunday through Thursday. If you want late night diner-esque food on the weekend, tough luck on campus. And, since Lakeside Dining Hall is now where the Diner resides, the Dining Hall closes an hour and a half earlier than it used to, at 8:30 p.m. And now Burke is closed an hour and a half earlier than it was last year, also at 8:30 p.m. This means Maea and Buffalo Phil’s are the only eating places on campus open from 8:30 to 10 p.m. The change in Lakeside Dining Hall’s hours makes a small amount of sense, but there’s no sensibility I can find in the change to Burke’s hours. It seems the focus for Bama Dining has left the students and landed on the money. Survey may have said some (probably non-majority) percentage of students wanted a classier sit-down restaurant, but I doubt they all wanted it with the sacrifices Bama Dining decided to add. And change changes everything.
things and he experiences something beautiful, but what do these experiences do for him? Martin isn’t bad in the role, there is just no arch. The major thing in his life he is still afraid to share with his father. Lee often times fills his movies with questions of America’s intrigue with sexuality. The best example is his film “The Ice Storm” which is about a 1970s Connecticut suburb of New York that is trying to cope with the aftermath of the
sexual revolution. In “Taking Woodstock,” he is more concerned with… well I don’t know really. He gives Elliot some beautiful moments, but they don’t amount to anything. We are still no closer to realizing who he is. He wants to experience the world, but that is something we know at the beginning. The best performance of the film is from Staunton, who is as good as actresses come. She
WOODSTOCK Continuned from page 12
an act that any musician has done with the song. Also, Havens’ performance of “Freedom” has a deeply patriotic bent to it. However, Sly and the Family Stone was possibly the pinnacle performance of the entire event. It was a wild and raucous show that is just as much about the music as the integrated band on stage. There are few bands in the history of music that can produce that type of energy. It still baffles many as to how this performance isn’t as widely renowned as some of the others. For those who don’t believe, just watch their performance of “I Want to Take You Higher.” Weisbard said one of the trends that came from the festival was the emergence of the singer/songwriter. People like Neil Young and Janis Joplin really grew from the experience of Woodstock. “The notion of the singer/songwriter really emerged… rock was becoming more pastoral, and Woodstock feeds that,” Weisbard said. Hall said it is interesting how the conservative right and evangelical Christians don’t look upon Woodstock with as much vitriolic hatred as certain other events of the 1960s. “There is a core conservative value to it,” Hall said. “It wasn’t a particularly political moment. “If you surveyed the crowd there would be a mass anti-war sentiment, but in ’69
there was plenty of that going around,” Hall said. Both Hendrix and Havens’ performance keyed in on the idea of America. Hendrix, through his own interpretation of the song that brings all Americans together, and Havens, on a song about what it means to truly be free. Hendrix performance wasn’t cynical, but was birthed out of his right to interpret “The Star Spangled Banner” as he saw fit. It was a version that, in many ways, defines the distance people felt from each other in those days. There is almost violence to it, an unraveling of the beliefs that the country held. Ultimately, the reason people really came was to experience something with people who had similar values. People came from everywhere to experience something with their own generation, the culture they had created. In the end, there are two Woodstocks: the cultural myth that we have created, and the actual event. There will always be a divide between what was and what we perceive. It’s hard to imagine that only two months before, there was an entire community turned to see man land on the moon. There was a moment that will be remembered for as long as we exist. People touched ground that seemed unattainable. Then, on the muddy banks of a hamlet in New York, there was something else that was beautiful. It was one generation’s way of closing their decade. Their parents had the moon. They had each other.
MAEA Bottom line: Good food, but not always worth the cost, and definitely not worth the changes it caused.
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gives an aggressive and subtle performance in the most haunting of ways. You hate her and love her in equal strides. As good as Lee is as a director he can’t pull all the strings of this story into one package. There is too much going on. He can’t harness his storylines to give us something with actual weight. Moments are brilliant, but moments are only that. Maybe a movie about Woodstock is destined to be as unfocused as the crowd.
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