Taking Woodstock (2009) Taking Woodstock" (2009) - Focus Features

Studio: Focus Features

Rating: R

Release Date: Aug 28, 2009

Running Time: 120 mins.

Country Of Origin: United States

starring: Demetri Martin, Kevin Chamberlin, Adam Pally, Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton, Liev Schreiber, Henry Goodman, Jonathan Groff, Eugene Levy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan

director: Ang Lee

Taking Woodstock

Emil Hirsch as Billy - "Taking Woodstock" (2009)

In 1969 Elliot Tiber, inadvertently played a role in making the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival into the famed happening it was. Working as an interior designer in Greenwich Village during culturally and politically exciting times, Mr. Tiber felt empowered by the gay rights movement. But he was also still staked to the family business - a Catskills motel. Upon hearing that a planned concert had lost its permit from the neighboring town of Wallkill, NY, Mr. Tiber called producer Michael Lang at Woodstock Ventures to offer his family's motel, the El Monaco, to the promoters. Soon the Woodstock staff was moving into the El Monaco; half a million people were on their way to Mr. Tiber's neighbor's Max Yasgur's farm in White Lake, NY; and Mr. Tiber found himself swept up in a generation-defining experience that would change his life, and American culture, forever.

PETER TRAVERS - August 26, 2009

Bright idea having the indisputably great director Ang Lee take us back to the garden to find the grit, grace and innocence that marked the Woodstock Music Festival in Bethel, New York, 40 years ago this month. Not so bright having the script by the estimable James Schamus focus on the sexual coming-out of Elliot Tiber (Comedy Central's Demetri Martin), whose failing family motel in the Catskills played a part in bringing the festival to fruition. How big a part? Festival producer Michael Lang,…

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District 9 (2009)

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Studio: TriStar Pictures

Release Date: Aug 14, 2009

Country Of Origin: United States

starring: Sharlto Copley, David James, Jason Cope, Mandla Gaduka, Vanessa Haywood, Kenneth Nkosi, William Allen Young, Hlengiwe Madlala

director: Neill Blomkamp, Peter Robert Gerber, Simon Hansen

District Nine

Thirty years ago, aliens made first contact with Earth. Humans waited for the hostile attack, or the giant advances in technology. Neither came. Instead, the aliens were refugees, the last survivors of their home world. The creatures were set up in a makeshift home in South Africa’s District 9 as the world’s nations argued over what to do with them. Now, patience over the alien situation has run out. Control over the aliens has been contracted out to Multi-National United, a private company uninterested in the aliens’ welfare – they will receive tremendous profits if they can make the aliens’ awesome weaponry work. So far, they have failed; activation of the weaponry requires alien DNA. The tension between the aliens and the humans comes to a head when an MNU field operative, Wikus van der Merwe, contracts a mysterious virus that begins changing his DNA. Wikus quickly becomes the most hunted man in the world, as well as the most valuable – he is the key to unlocking the secrets of alien technology. Ostracized and friendless, there is only one place left for him to hide: District 9.