Ebertfest 2009: Day One

Roger Ebert's annual film fest in Champaign/Urbana got off to a rocking start last night-- literally. The opening night film was Michael Wadleigh's epic rock concert doc Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music. It was even more epic than most people may recall (feel free to imagine your own joke here about people being unable to remember Woodstock), because Wadleigh brought the Director's Cut, which weighs in at 225 minutes (the original theatrical cut was a mere 184 minutes—practically a short).

The added performance footage (and most of the extra stuff is performance) enhances the immersive experience, but I have to say some of my favorite moments in the film are still crowd shots and brief interviews, like the unexpectedly moving talk with the guy (maybe 50) who is cleaning the portable toilets. He's just trying to do a hard job (hey, half a million people generate a lot of crap over three days), and if you have any assumption that he's going to be some old fart complaining about these damn hippies, you're in for a pleasant shock; he notes that everyone has been nice, he doesn't seem to care all that much about the drugs and sex, and, in a final moving note, he talks about his kids. One of his sons, he says with a smile, is somewhere at the fest. The other son is in Vietnam. And then he goes back to doing his job. That gets me every time.

Seeing the film on the huge screen of Champaign's Virginia Theater confirmed (if anybody needed it confirmed) that this film was conceived for the biggest damned screen you can find. On a big screen, you really get the full impact of things like Wadleigh's intense closeups of Richie Havens' muscular thumb working the frets of his guitar on "Freedom." Awesome. And the split screen effects for which the film is so famous are much more dramatic when your eye is scanning across a massive plain to move from image to image.

I had an added pleasure: introducing the film to a newbie. The woman sitting next to me was all of 20, and before the film began, she asked "So, this is a documentary?" Yes, it's a documentary, but it's so much more than that. One of the nicest things about the post-film Q&A, which ran past midnight, was the last comment from the audience, which came from a 19-year-old, who didn't really have a question, but just wanted to say how she'd discovered this film a few months ago and been converting her friends to it ever since. And, as a perfect final note of the night, she just couldn't believe she was here talking to the people who made it. Nice.

Today, I have the distinct pleasure of running a Q&A with Guy Maddin after a screening of his crazy (does he make any other kind of film?) "doc" My Winnipeg, a loving, loopy ode to his hometown. As we used to say in the newspaper business, look to this space tomorrow for more.