It’s mildly stunning that it took so lengthy for a documentary concerning the 1999 version of the Woodstock music competition to be made. In any case, this was an epic, epoch-defining debacle that deserves extra scrutiny than, say, the Fyre Competition, a preposterous fiasco from 2017 that crashed earlier than really taking place but has already prompted two movies about it.
Garret Worth’s HBO doc “Woodstock 99” neatly captures a cultural second, albeit a damaging one. The primary in a documentary collection created by Invoice Simmons, the movie could also be subtitled “Peace, Love and Rage,” however the first two substances had been in brief provide on these scorching July days 22 years in the past. The occasion rapidly devolved right into a hellscape of overflowing porta-potties, hungry and thirsty festivalgoers, horrific sexual assaults, arson and even deaths. A lot of the footage is hair-raising, particularly the ladies being groped and the mobs of younger white males whipping themselves right into a frenzy of aggressive stupidity, aimless anger and turbo-boosted misogyny. That is these dudes’ coming-of-age as an aggrieved demographic, and it’s scary.
Worth makes an attempt to place the competition in context, framing it towards a interval of financial progress tempered by malaise: Invoice Clinton’s impeachment and the Columbine Excessive College shootings occurred earlier that yr, for instance, and Y2K angst was rising. Add testimonies from attendees and journalists, and (too brief) excerpts from the dwell performances, and the proceedings usually really feel rushed. The movie may simply have been longer.
As with most post-mortems, “Woodstock 99” tries to determine the way it all went unsuitable, and comes up with a lethal mixture of things: a cruel atmosphere, inconsiderate programming (three feminine acts didn’t counterbalance seas of aggro headliners like Limp Bizkit, Child Rock, Korn and Metallica) and botched logistics. The difficulty of water bottles costing $4 comes up quite a bit. This was “considerably on the excessive aspect,” says John Scher, one of many promoters, earlier than coolly including, “In case you’re going to go to a competition, you convey cash with you — this was not a poor man’s competition.”
Afterward, Scher, who emerges because the embodiment of cynical company villainy, argues that the ladies dealing with a barrage of verbal and bodily abuse had been “not less than partially guilty for that” as a result of they “had been working round bare,” and accuses the media, notably MTV Information, of creating Woodstock 99 look dangerous. Even now, he simply can’t quit on his delusion of the competition being successful.
Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage
Not rated. Operating time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms.