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hammerva

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Just watched the Woodstock documentary and while it is really solid and full of really wild shit it is really the perfect example of trying way too fucking hard to explain the obvious.  It really comes off like 2021 person trying to explain a 1999 mentality and at times you are like settle down.   

First of all the promoter of this show is an incredible scumbag at the time in press conferences and trying to justify why things were so bad.  The original promoters were incompetent but with good intentions mostly.  The 1994 and 1999 promoter was carny fucker who saw dollar signs in the name.   Also some incredible slut shaming about the rapes and sexual abuse from them.

The level of reaching on this documentary to explain this disaster that really bugged me:

1.  The one reporter trying to explain that having a crowd of about 80% young white guys screaming MY N**** when DMX is on stage as a sign of how violent it was going to be and how racist this young generation of people are

2.  While the way women were really handled the entire weekend were absolutely horrible and disgusting  (never mind the fact that only 3 women was on the entire festival), the idea that things like Girls Gone Wild and Maxim and FHM Magazine portrayed the idea that women need to be put back into the place and that is why women were getting groped and fondled and raped by these men is just bullshit.   

3  Maybe it is because of how old I am but this concept of treating Grunge as this progressive, free thinking, and understanding form of music and society while Nu Metal is just a bunch of drunk horny white men pretending to angry and throwing up their middle finger is a bit of a stretch.   

I did love the stuff about how MTV how was promoting the hell out of it was also a massive target by almost everyone because of how correctly 1999 MTV pretty much turned into a version of a teen dance show.   Watching Carson Daly getting pelted will never not be funny.  Also Moby and Creed still being the pretentious ego maniac now.    And while all of this shit happening it is fucking 100 degrees outside.   The idea that most of these fires were started by candles that were handed out as a memorial to the shooting at Columbine  and stopping gun violence I guess really explains Woodstock 99 perfectly

This is a documentary that is designed to piss off almost everyone watching in some way.   Some for the absolutely deserved reason and some depending on what 2021 thinks of 1999.

 

Edited by hammerva
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didn't Michael Lang promote all three Woodstock shows (and 2019, but it never happened)?

EDIT: Also, Dexter Holland from Offspring looks like Dave Holmes now.

Edited by Casey
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My main takeaway from this documentary is how fucking scared I would be to go to a festival of 500K or whatever it was with no cellphone. I always go to Bonnaroo in groups, and the rare few times I went by myself, I always had at least some friends that I knew were there that I could contact if I got lost or was having a bad trip or whatever. I know we're all dependent on technology now, but in the early part of the documentary when they said they had a place where you could go if you got separated from your group or whatever... that's downright terrifying to me. I know we have a lot of older members that post here that remember a time before cell phones and shit, but I'm not one of those people. I can't imagine losing a member of my group and having no way to contact them to see if they're okay. What good is a bank of payphones going to do when cellphones aren't that widespread in 1999? Pagers, maybe? I don't know.

On the topic of the promoters - yeah, fuck the dude who slut-shamed the victims of sexual abuse. I've seen SO MANY naked men and women in the 10+ years I've went to Bonnaroo, and they're just like anyone else, wanting to have a good time and express themselves. And it struck me that Lang, for as much as he might want to promote the original Woodstock was all about peace and love and whatever, he's just a capitalist cosplaying as a hippie back then. The video of him just looking SO crestfallen that people were breaking into Woodstock '69 is very telling, because it's clear money was also a motivator in throwing that festival. I mean, no hate, we live in America after all, but don't pretend to be some sort of counter-culture hippie and then get mad that people sneak in or whatever.

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8 hours ago, RIPPA said:

Funnily I was gonna ask the same thing - we have nothing but pre-assigned seating around here and it has been that way for awhile pre-pandemic

We have a mixture here.  A couple theaters have the assigned seating and the one I actually like does not.

Incidentally, someone just died from one of those reclining theater seats.  They dropped something on the floor, bent down to pick it up and the chair closed on them and couldn't be reopened.

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I watched the Woodstock doc today, and I thought it was actually super creepy how they handled all the nudity. I understand that’s part of the story, but past a certain point—and it went WAY past that point—it became just as exploitive of those women as the Girls Gone Wild culture of the 90’s that the doc is decrying IMO. The doc positively ogles them, at times.

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On 8/5/2021 at 12:52 AM, Curt McGirt said:

BITCHIN': THE SOUND AND FURY OF RICK JAMES

I read Rick James' biography last year, and if he never sang a damn song in his life, it would have been a great biography.  They made one Rick James, and quite frankly one is about as many as the world would be able to handle.

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I read it too and it was great.

I also watched all of that Cocaine Cowboys series earlier today. At first I thought "there's no way they're getting six episodes out of this" and lo and behold the story just kept twisting and twisting. 

Spoiler

The prosecution not taking the plea bargain was pointed at as ego and hubris on their part, but clearly they didn't want their entire bullshit system exposed as corrupt, especially considering the payoffs went all the way up the food chain. If they really cared about corruption they would have jumped, but no. And because of that they inadvertently ended up getting multiple people murdered as well. Great job! 

Probably the craziest part is the hit list getting printed in both the lawyer's magazine and Prison Life. Obviously publication companies are as corruptible as cops, judges, and juries.

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So, I watched both Summer of Soul and Woodstock '99 today and sheesh, I should have watched them in the opposite order.  Summer of Soul was the story of a summer festiwas val in Harlem where pretty much every relevant black artist  in 1969\showed up and everybody had a great time.  Woodstock '99 was about a summer festival in New York where pretty much every relevant artist in '99 showed up and nobody had a good time.  The thing that struck me is that the people in Harlem had every reason to be mad at the time, but showed up and were happy as hell to be at this incredible concert.  The people at Woodstock had no reason to be fucking angry, but they were fucking pissed that they were at this incredible concert.  I graduated from high school in 1999, so I remember this era pretty well.  I had a friend who used to go to a lot of concerts, and I can remember one day in Algebra II he was telling a few of us about how many artists he'd hit with bottles at concerts.  He'd go see his favorite bands, specifically to throw things at them.  He wasn't some kid who was a troublemaker in class or someone who got into a bunch of fights.  He wasn't even a douchebag like a lot of 17-18 year olds, there was just an incredibly high level of basic asshoolery that seemed to be built into every teenager at the time.

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Most of the Dark Side of the 90's shows on Viceland has been rather same old same old.   The one on the Viper Room where River Phoenix died was interesting.  Last night I watched the one about the rise and fall of the Beanie Babies fad and man forgot about how nuts that craze was.   Especially the McDonalds versions that had people going to these places like they were card shows with food.   Always thought over saturation killed the craze but apparently the final straw was "retiring" all the original ones, actually you were finished as a business, and then putting new ones out a couple months later.    

 

 

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Checked out the Val Kilmer documentary on Prime. Really really gutting, all you want are for things to go well for him. All of the behind the scenes stuff he shot is pretty amazing. Especially fun are backstage stuff with him and a young Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn while they were still doing theatre, Top Gun and of course The Island of Dr. Moreau. I haven't watched Lost Soul, the Moreau documentary, do they use any of Kilmer's footage?

I just wish they didn't zoom through the last 10 odd years of his career. Would have loved for him to talk a bit about Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (or Real Genius, for that matter, as far as his early roles go).

Big recommendation and it is uncanny how much his son Jack can sound like him during his voiceovers.

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Finished watching Secrets of the Whales over the weekend.  This is an incredible 4-part documentary miniseries produced by James Cameron.  Similar to Life, it raises the bar for nature documentaries with its amazing footage.  Each episode is dedicated to one or two species of whale, which is then covered in-depth.  Sigourney Weaver provides the narration.  You'll learn a lot throughout but, really, the main appeal here is the incredible footage.  There's one jaw-dropping sequence after another.  Perhaps the most amazing is the incredible footage of families of sperm whales sleeping suspended vertically.  There's other amazing footage of narwhals and humpbacks and an orca going up onto a beach to grab seal.  And on and on and on.  I really only had two quibbles with this one.  First is the narration.  Weaver is fine but the material she's given is WAAAAAAAAAAY over the top and dramatic, attributing thoughts, feelings, and actions to the whales that we can't possibly know.  It gets annoying fast and only gets worse.  Second, is the constant heaping of praise on the main photographer for the series.  Like so many nature shows, he gets a ton of praise and is treated as if he's the only one shooting any video or taking any photographs - meanwhile, we're watching footage of him doing exactly that.  They act like he's the only person in the world who can possibly get these incredible shots and we're not supposed to notice that, ya know, there's somebody else RIGHT THERE shooting video of him doing his thing.  This frustrated me more and more as I watched the episodes.  In the end, though, these are minor quibbles and should definitely be overlooked.  10/10.

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Holy shit as if the Malice in the Palace was bad to begin with, the head official in the game was Tim Donaghy    ?  

Man these cops in Detroit were so incompetent they thought Reggie Miller was a fan running the court and almost maced him  

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37 minutes ago, hammerva said:

Man these cops in Detroit were so incompetent they thought Reggie Miller was a fan running the court and almost maced him  

Two things:

1) They weren't "cops in Detroit" since the Palace was actually about 35 miles from Detroit.

2) It's cute to think they didn't recognize him and still want to mace him anyway. 

:)

 

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Watched the Woodstock 99 doc last night and the biggest take away is that co-promoter John Scher was and still is a total bag of shit, his comments from back in 99 and today are just jaw dropping. Also, co-promoter Mike Lang shouldn't be allowed to skate just because he works everyone with his hippie gimmick, dude was a sleaze back in 1969 and 1999.

I would have turned 25 a few weeks before Woodstock 99, so I was in the age range of most of the crowd but I never liked Nu-Metal, Metallica and Rage Against the Machine and hated their jock/frat boy/teen who's angry at a step-parent fanbase, so I had no desire to goto Woodstock 99 or watch any of it on MTV. They really stretched in trying to tie the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and Y2K anxiety as a reason the mostly male crowd was acting that way towards women and so angsty, I can't remember anyone around my age caring about either, for Clinton-Lewinsky it was more of an "ewwww" than anything else, Y2K fears were something everyone just joked about. Moby and a few of the journalists talking about how things were so enlightened during the short lived "grunge" era and how things morphed into Nu-Metal was kind of off in my opinion, Nu-Metal is more of an offshoot of Hair Metal(misogyny) and 80's Hardcore/Punk(anger), shows from the "grunge" era also had issues with dudes groping women in the pit and crowd surfing, I remember announcements from the stage about it at the Lolapalooza's I went to in 92, 93 and 94. Sure the segment of mostly white young males age 13 to 33? who break stuff just to break stuff since they never deal with the consequences were all over Woodstock 99 and a problem, but the biggest reason things broke down was due to the promoters greed, the doc gets away from that at points.

The crowd not caring about the Woodstock 69 shout-out's and Robby Krieger was hilarious! My favorite bands are The Who and The Kinks but I hate the forced upon me baby boomer nostalgia that dominated pop culture from 1985ish to present day, that those old hippie farts and dbags like Moby and the Creed guy got a face of reality that weekend was a bright spot.

The Limp Bizkit guitarist who flipped off the crowd looked like every dude who was pushing 30 who picked a fight with me when I was between the ages of 15 and 45. Would Moby's opinion of Woodstock 99 been different if his name would have been on that plywood sign? Hating on MTV for not playing "my kind of music" had been a thing since about 1982 when MTV finally had more the 30 videos in their library.

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Thanks for the reminder about the Untold series. I just watched Malice in the Palace. Not a sports fan really but I love watching 30 for 30 and other sports docs and I'm gonna enjoy these the same, especially when they're super controversial like this. 

Anyway, this was really well done. I can't believe the raw footage wasn't what was immediately examined by the league... not that their reaction would have been any different though, since they didn't want to piss off the fans as noted. "Thugs" being the pejorative term is so goddamn transparent, especially coming out of all those middle-aged white mouths. One wonders how this would have been handled a decade later when the Twitterverse and everyone else would have a say in things. And man, Ron Artest/Metta World Peace is just... weird. Like I know he's got mental issues but he just comes off like a real odd duck. 

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