Weekend Movie Forecast: Taking Woodstock or The Final Destination

Ang Lee follows up his most recent dramas Brokeback Mountain and Lust Caution with a gentle trip back to 1969 with Taking Woodstock, based on Elliot Tiber's memoir. Tiber, who was helping out at his parents' motel, is played by Demetri Martin while Eugene Levy plays Max Yasgur. The Post's Lou Lumenick gives it 1.5 stars, "Taking Woodstock achieves an amazing feat: It turns the fabled music festival, a key cultural moment of the late 20th century, into an exceedingly lame, heavily clichéd, thumb-sucking bore." But the Wahsington Post's Ann Hornaday writes, "If you stick with this wistful, fitfully funny little trip, you will be rewarded with a movie that makes up in warmth, humanism and self-effacing modesty what it lacks in crackerjack pacing and epic pop-historical grandeur."