The Week in Film: Woodstock, Wintour and remembering Dominick Dunne

Starting this week, we're introducing a brand new weekly movie feature. Every Thursday, movie critic Alonso Duralde will guide you to what's new at the box office that a gay or bi guy (and our gay-friendly straight readers) might want to check out! Alonso will also have news about coming movies, trailers from coming attractions, pictures from the week's premieres and much more! 

And now on with the show, er, column!

OPENING THIS WEEK:

Taking Woodstock

The obvious place to start is with Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, a comic look behind the scenes at the legendary rock concert. (Am I alone among Gen-Xers in having grown tired of glassy-eyed nostalgia for this event sometime around 1981?)

It’s Lee’s first comedy since The Wedding Banquet in 1993, and Taking Woodstock confirms that the man behind Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon doesn’t have the lightest touch when it comes to wit and whimsy.

As I pointed out in my review, Liev Schreiber (as a Marine-turned–gun-toting-drag-queen) and Mamie Gummer (as one of the more clear-eyed among the concert organizers) manage to steal a few scenes, but there’s a great big void where a lead character ought to be.

The film is based on Eliot Tiber’s memoir, but Lee and his frequent screenwriting collaborator James Schamus fail to define Tiber very well. That problem is exacerbated by the blank-faced performance given by comedian Demetri Martin.

Lee and Schamus earn queer points for not skirting around Tiber’s homosexuality (even though Martin could have benefited with some media training before giving “ew, I had to kiss a guy” interviews), but for me, anyway, Taking Woodstock feels too well-scrubbed and polite in recounting what must have been a more tumultuous story.