The film deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and it's still a stunning achievement. Abundant footage taken among the massive crowd ("half a million strong") expresses the human heart of the event, from skinny-dipping hippies to accidental overdoses, to unpredictable weather, midconcert childbirth, and the thoughtful (or just plain rambling) reflections of the festive participants. Then, of course, there is the music--a nonstop parade of rock & roll from the greatest performers of the period, including Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Canned Heat, The Who, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Ten Years After, Sly & The Family Stone, Santana, and many more. Watching this ambitious film, as the saying goes, is the next best thing to being there--it's a time-travel journey to that once-in-a-lifetime event. --Jeff Shannon

Product Description
Never before seen performances: canned heat janis joplin crosby stills and nash jefferson airplane and jimi hendrix. With forty-minutes extra footage. Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 06/28/2005 Run time: 225 minutes Rating: R

I bought the DVD so I could have chapter access to each performance. Indeed, the DVD does have that, but it is all for naught.

The picture on the DVD is vastly inferior to the VHS. Images that can be clearly seen on the VHS don't register many times at all on the DVD, i.e the outline and some features of a guy dancing are clearly visible on the VHS as they were on film in a theatre. On the DVD, you just see the outine of the figure with a hint of subtler visual attributes. The sound on the DVD is the worst I've heard on any release from a major company. I've seen and heard better on second-rate VHS's and DVD's from the likes of Laserdisc.

Boy, will I read those ratings on visual and sound quality from now on. The review on Amazon's "technical information" for this DVD is absoulutely correct.

I will never buy another DVD or VHS from Warner Bros without first renting and previewing it. So I still watch my 2-tape VHS of this landmark film of this one-time phenomenon.

The DVD is on one two-sided disc, which doesn't even break at the intermission, to rub salt in this inexcusable mangling from Warner Bros. First, they blew their initial Kubrick set and now this disgrace.

If you want this film on video, get in the well-done and tecnically superior VHS double tape. Incompent .... Jack Warner would have kicked who ever is responsible for this rip-off DVD most deservedly in the teeth...


Woodstock 1999? Huh?   September 19, 1999
bob (kansas city, missouri USA)
106 out of 129 found this review helpful

Having been in Vietnam in1969 i did not have a chance to actually go to woodstock.I waited almost 30 years before i saw this documentary.This is the kind of experience that one has to open the mind and heart and close off all pre-concieved ideas,prejudices,religious and any and all other ideas and thoughts and just (to quote the hippies)go with your feelings.This was a once in a lifetime experience that will likely never be back again.360,000 young people(and some not quite so young)brought together for three days love,music,drugs and rock and roll.Even disallowing all the illecit drug use(the reference to the "bad acid"(not poisoned)just bad.One can watch this movie and maybe get just a small glimmer of what was occuring those three days.I finished movie and for a good week could not quit thinking about what i had seen and heard.Young girls and boys swimming in a lake naked,people getting rained on and instead of griping and complaining making a game of it! Feeding each other,both physically and spiritually and emotionally and no one getting hurt.My God! Where has this country gone wrong in the last 30 years?Maybe only people from my generation can truly understand what happened then.I am passing this movie around to friends and people at work ,some whom are my age and others much younger and they seem to really get into it(oops another hippie slang-sorry)Watch this movie-if only for your own peace of mind!(Yeah i borrowed part of that last sentence also) P E A C E


3 Days at Yasgur's Farm   February 2, 2001
Thomas Magnum (NJ, USA)
29 out of 33 found this review helpful

The Woodstock Festival was a defining for the counterculture movement. The young hippies showed a nation that they could exist together in a peaceful, communal state. The Woodstock documentary captures the essence of those three days on a farm in upstate New York. We see hippies skinny-dipping, the locals looking around in amazement on the deluge of people who descending on their quiet, little town, kids, cops and others are interviewed and of course we see the music. From Richie Havens' opening things up with "Freedom" to Jimi Hendrix's defining "Star Spangled Banner", we are treated to a 60's rock who's who. Joe Cocker, Santana, CSN&Y, John Sebastian and Sly & The Family Stone particularly standout and we get bonus material not in the original release from The Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and others. Director Michael Wadleigh's film won a deserving Best Documentary Oscar and a young Martin Scorcese was an editor on the film. Some of the acts are woefully dated and long forgotten, but Woodstock is an impressive snapshot of a memorable moment in our history.


Beautiful and dirty   June 26, 2004
Gavin Wilson
21 out of 23 found this review helpful

Although I was a teenager soon after this concert, I somehow never got around to seeing the moving until this year. (I guess concert films don't get screened frequently on terrestrial TV.) So over the years I've become more familiar with the triple LP of the movie and, of course, the many posters the rock stars in heroic poses that dominated the early 1970s -- i.e. the Who's Roger Daltrey, Jimi Hendrix and Ten Years After's Alvin Lee.

Despite the mud and the squalor, this is an extraordinarily beautiful film, with the screen often breaking up into two or three segments. (Note on the closing credits the name of Martin Scorsese on the production team.)

It's well worth contrasting this movie with the DVD of the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. Only a year separates the two concerts, but the late 1960s idealism of Woodstock gets replaced by prototype British vandalism. The Who perform at both concerts, and make an equally good account of themselves. Daltrey's emotional delivery of 'See Me, Feel Me' helps to explain why 'Tommy' became such a phenomenon in America. Hendrix also performed at both, but his meandering solo at Woodstock was not of the highest standard.

The other highlight of the show was Santana, a Latino band only just beginning to establish themselves in California at the time. As others have noted, the drum solo by Mike Shrieve is impressive for one so young. As with the Who, Santana's album sales will have multiplied as a result of their Woodstock performance.

It's interesting how many great acts weren't at Woodstock -- e.g. Joni Mitchell (despite her song about the concert!), the Doors, Bob Dylan or the Stones. The first two clearly realised how important these festivals were in the breaking of artists into markets, and so they appear on the Isle of Wight DVD.

For most of my life, Woodstock has been a set of static images, largely taken from the cover of the album. But as this film reveals, there is so much more imagery than pictures of beautiful women bathing in the lake. Quite apart from all the idealism of passing whisky bottles and reefers around, of sliding in the mud, the film shows the flip side: of people queuing in the mud to phone home, of helicopters rescuing the sick, of helpers cleaning toilets, and of barefoot stragglers looking for a pair of shoes amid a post-concert site that looks more of a wasteland than the trenches of the First World War.

Enjoy it in all its glory and all its grime.


Classic performances...but   November 13, 1999
58 out of 70 found this review helpful

Obviously this stands as a document of the time and the music, and is a mandatory purchase for anyone who was a part of the 60s, or a fan of the music. From a quality and technical standpoint, this could have been produced for much better for the DVD release. Thus a 3 star rating.

1. Even in 5.1, the sound quality sucks! The intro of CS&Ns "Lone Time Gone" sounds crackley and muffled, and is only the beginning of the lousy sound throughout.

2. Since the original release only utilized part of the screen, when put in widescreen, the film is shrunk down. There is actually more black screen than picture!

3. The additional footage was placed poorly into the movie, very uneven flow.

4. Not enough footage of Janis and others, and very few bands are actually represented in the film. No additional footage for The Band, the Dead, Sweetwater, and many others that could have been included for this release. Much of this was aired on PBS a few years back, but not included in this version.