Woodstock 99: Peace Love and Rage

It's a weird thing watching a documentary on something you remember vividly. I was 22 when this hellstorm happened. I'd wanted to go to one of the music festivals that were so prevalent in the 90's like Lollapalooza or Lilith Fair ... but not this one. It seemed wrong from the outset. Misguided. The line-up was assembled in a way that said "we do not understand the culture of today's youth, we're just gonna dump it in a basket and throw it at them". I remember seeing the mud and garbage storms and the fires, and hearing stories of carnage and price gouging at the concession stands. This doc goes in WAY deeper, and does it quite well, for the most part. Like most docs, it's led by talking-heads. Several attendees, including one who was best friends with someone who died there; a security guard; music journalists and MTV personalities who were there; artists who performed there; and the festival's co-founders. You get all sorts of points of view to expose all the myriad ways Woodstock 99 wasn't just a disaster, but an easily avoidable one that the promoters were either too clueless to know about, too arrogant to consider, or too greedy to see. Or a mix of all three. The movie explains a lot of the surrounding circumstances that made it a total debacle, from the geography of the event to the line-up that catered to a specific demographic of young, angry white guys to the weather to accommodations that were understaffed and over-burdened before the first day was over to a security force made up of the target demo. So many things had to go wrong for it to go as bad as it did, and this gives a voice to just about every angle of it, including the delusional co-promoters, who want to point the finger at MTV (for "setting the stage" with their reporting), the heat, and Fred Durst. It is great that the doc makers didn't just form a narrative, instead letting all sides tell their stories. But when you've got 10 people telling one story, and one clueless baby boomer telling another ... you will wanna punch the TV is all I'm saying. One flaw in Woodstock 99 as a documentary is that the makers tend to wander off on these tangents that are meant to explain something to viewers who may not have lived through it or just weren't hip to it. The tangents end up being somewhat problematic, though. One tangent attempts to explain how nu-metal rose out of the ashes of grunge. The tangent skips a LOT of cultural steps in between, but that's a nitpick; the bigger sin is how the tangent deifies Kurt Cobain. You'd think, according to this documentary, Cobain by himself was responsible for ending the careers of all the hair metal bands and pop artists of the 80's, as well as being the only band during the early 90's grunge heyday. Yes, they were the biggest selling band, but they were only the tip of the spear. This documentary stops just shy of using the dreading "voice of a generation" title he so hated, but it uses every other way possible to say it. The hero worship is gross. Equally bad is a tangent explaining how Metallica had villainized themselves at the time with their anti-Napster platform. You think it's leading somewhere, as if Metallica had a big role to play in the carnage at the festival. Nope. The context never amounts to anything. Another problem is bloat; there is some severe padding in this, like a good 2 uninterrupted minutes of Limp Bizkit's performance where he eggs on the crowd to "break stuff". 15-20 seconds will make the point. I did not need 2 minutes of Alanis Morrisette performing to a crowd that could not have cared less that she was there to prove to me how the crowd couldn't have cared she was there (or that she was one of three obviously token women performers). The movie belabors some points and pads them out where it could've been trimmed up and shortened the nearly 2-hour runtime. Contradictorily, I could've used some compare-and-contrast with Woodstock 94 and why that WASN'T a catastrophe, and this doc has no interest in that. This is a solid recommendation for music fans, especially some with music history knowledge. Seeing all the factors that turned Woodstock 99 into the Gen-X Altamont is a fascinating watch, even if the doc isn't always at its best or wears its fanboy preferences on its sleeve.