“Taking Woodstock” Offers Nothing New

Reviewing Ang Lee's concert-set comedy, "Still Walking" and "We Live in Public."

Did you think I’d forgotten about Lee’s first two features, “Pushing Hands” and “The Wedding Banquet”? Nope, just needed a segue. Both are examples of the venerable family melodrama, as beautifully exemplified by Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Still Walking,” which takes place on the day that a Japanese family annually gathers to commemorate the anniversary of the eldest son’s long-ago death by drowning.

Dad (Yoshio Harada), nearing retirement age, remains a distant, impossible-to-please authority figure, forever measuring his surviving son (Hiroshi Abe) against the memory of Junpei, the child who died before he had any opportunity to squander his potential. Mom (Kirin Kiki), who on the surface seems bubbly and eager to please, in fact harbors a passive-aggressive grudge against the little boy, now grown, whose life Junpei saved when he drowned, inviting the guilty wretch to dinner every year despite (or because of) his evident discomfort. Their daughter (You — that’s the actress’ name), a happy-go-lucky flake, does her best to stay out of everyone else’s way. Grandkids run amok, creating hilarious sight gags in the background.

Unlike Kore-eda’s “Nobody Knows” and “Hana,” both of which dragged on well past the point of active engagement, “Still Walking” feels perfectly proportioned, making one telling observation after another with a light, quicksilver touch that contrasts nicely with the film’s somewhat heavy mood. The terrific ensemble cast conveys subtle emotions borne of years of accumulated resentments, and Kore-eda maintains a disciplined, unobtrusive camera style, capturing their movements and expressions without getting in their way.

Still, while I recommend this to you without hesitation, I must say that it’s a very small movie — the kind that makes no mistakes in large part because it takes no risks and demonstrates little ambition. In the year that it’s taken “Still Walking” to get a U.S. release, Kore-eda has already made another film, “Air Doll,” about an inflatable sex toy that comes to life; it’s a less successful effort overall, but it takes up considerably more space in my long-term memory, if only due to a few outré scenes. “Still Walking” is the kind of solid effort that you thoroughly enjoy and then mostly forget. It could use a dash of audacity.

Internet mogul Josh Harris, the subject of Ondi Timoner’s “We Live in Public,” which won the documentary prize at Sundance last January, added audacity to his life in giant destructive dollops. Long aware before most people that American society was destined to gravitate online, Harris first founded (in 1993) a site called Pseudo.com, which attempted to replicate a cable-access TV format on the nascent World Wide Web via an early, unsteady version of streaming video. At the end of the millennium, he designed and presided over Quiet: We Live in Public, in which a hundred New York art types (including Timoner, several years before she made “DiG!”) gathered to live in an underground bunker, their every move — including showers, shitting and sex — captured by omnipresent cameras.

Eventually, Harris and his then-girlfriend, Tanya, started their own Web site, also called We Live in Public, documenting their daily lives 24/7 for a small but rabid audience. Clearly, the film argues, this guy foresaw every last detail of the way our lives have drastically changed over the past 15 years or so, even if he utterly failed to profit from that foresight. (He made millions in the ’90s, but lost it all when the dot-com bubble burst.)

“We Live in Public” is undeniably fascinating, but the throughline Timoner has concocted seems awfully ad hoc. Josh and Tanya’s site only really foreshadows the exhibitionism.com surge we’re experiencing today, and even that was done first by Jennifer “JenniCam” Ringley, who I’m pretty sure was a much bigger Internet phenomenon. (I vividly recall all the time I spent in 1996 ignoring freely available Internet porn in favor of trying to catch a fleeting glimpse of this perfectly ordinary young woman undressing; it almost seems charming now.)

But Timoner had tons of footage she’d shot at Quiet a decade ago, so we spend almost half the movie watching a pretty stupid conceptual art project that has little to do with Twitter or Facebook or MySpace or really much of anything apart from the antics of a bunch of people bored enough to play guinea pig for a month. Likewise, Pseudo.com was ahead of its time but also wound up being an object lesson in precisely how internet content was not going to work. Harris remains a fascinating figure — his alter ego Luvvy is almost too bizarre to believe — but the case for his uncanny prescience seems pretty weak to me, and I trust the film even less after discovering that today he’s not just hangin’ in Ethiopia teaching basketball to little kids, as the conclusion implies, but is in fact CEO of the African Entertainment Network, a detail that Timoner carefully fails to mention because it doesn’t fit the character arc she’s manufactured. An absorbing crock.

Mike D’Angelo is our guest critic for the month of August.

“Taking Woodstock” opens in New York and Los Angeles today, followed by a wide release on August 28th; “Still Walking” is now available on VOD and will open in New York on August 28th, followed by a limited release on September 4th; and “We Live in Public” opens in New York on August 28th, followed by a tour of the film in select cities across the country.

[Additional photo: Josh Harris in "We Live in Public," Interloper Films, 2009]

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