Cannes: Taking Woodstock, Un Prophete
Ang Lee means tragic stories. At least that has been the case in recent years. Watch Taking Woodstock, and you will be astounded his this man changes genres like we change shirts. How many directors in contemporary world cinema can we think of who has such versatility in terms of theme, treatment and making as Lee? From Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Lust, Caution, through Sense & Sensibility, The Hulk, Brokeback Mountain et al., this man has taken up all kinds of themes. And now, he comes up with this delightful comic drama about how the legendary Woodstock Music Fest of 1969 came about. In a masterstroke, he never shows the concert itself, though some of the great music constantly plays throughout the film. Rather, it is about the lives of people around the festival, particularly Elliot Tiber who played an inadvertent but very important role in realizing the fest (and whose memoir this film is based on), and his parents, and, of course, those millions of Hippies who had descended at Greenwich village during those tumultuous days in August, 1969. It’s a film that rocks, and is quite a shift from the heavyduty stuff on view here. Lee said at the media conference today that he wanted to make this comedy after making so many tragic stories, and to pay a tribute to the innocence of the youth in those times….but be warned, you will not like this feel if you come expecting another typical Ang Lee film……….
Jacques Audiard’s Un Prophete is another film in Competition for Palme d’Or that demands a view, though we have seen quite a few films with similar themes earlier. It’s about a young Arab sent to jail in multicultural France for a crime he had committed. In the jail, he is forced to run an “errand” – and kill a fellow inmate – by the powerful Corsican mafia. This sucks him into the world of crime, and with one act leading to another, he is deep into it before he knows it, finally even enjoying and benefitting from it. With constant reference to racism that exists in many societies, the film is a gritty tale. Even if there is nothing extraordinary about it, and its length being a deterrent (nearly two-and-a-half hours), this is worth a watch…….
Tags: 62nd Cannes Film Festival, Ang Lee, Jacques Audiard, Taking Woodstock, Un Prophete, World Cinema
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Damn, a movie concerning Woodstock itself sounds so awesome
Guys sonam Kapoor was supposed to walk for L’Oreal at cannes on 19th of this month.
They gave a huge lunch party to announce it.
But due to back door politics they told her she cannot attend in the last minute.
So we fans made a group to show that such kind of treatment is not tolerated.
Please join the grp and show your support.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=81167894729&ref=nf
can’t wait to watch taking woodstock. ang lee understands people like no one else. i am so jealous of the generation that got to witness woodstock. they believed they could change the world. they were idealistsic. all this talk also makes me wanna watch ‘almost famous’ again.
Doors and Almost Famous were one of those movies which gave true glimpse in flower era…and making a film on Woodstock where it all started sounds pretty exciting…