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Dropping Out.

Article Excerpt
The new Ang Lee film, "Taking Woodstock," is not about the music festival of forty years ago. Nobody plays Hendrix, as if anyone could. Nobody mimes to the Grateful Dead, a decision that merits our undying gratitude. There is no Janis Joplin, although surviving footage suggests that, even when Janis was there, she wasn't really there. True, we get snatches of music borne on the wind, plus distant views of the throng around the stage; but most of the movie busies itself with the lead-up to the main event. This is no bad thing: the sidelong glance is often our best approach to historical happenings, and, in this case, we already have a report from center stage--"Woodstock," the 1970 documentary directed by Michael Wadleigh and heroically edited by, among others, the young Martin Scorsese.

Our guide is Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin), whose parents, the oppressed Jake (Henry Goodman) and the oppressive Sonia (Imelda Staunton), run the El Monaco, in White Lake, deep in the Borscht Belt. It's a motel that has seen better days, although even the better days, you suspect, were not that good. It has a swimming pool that Jake spikes with bleach instead of chlorine, and a sign saying "Play at Own Risk." (Indeed, the plethora of signs around the property gives it an air of inadvertent neo-Pop--a hint that it may be flexing itself for fresh culture.) Elliot shores up the business, acting as president of...

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