The Woodstock 99 Documentaries

Monday is about movies. Or TV. Today it's both. The recent Netflix 3-part Woodstock 99 documentary. And the earlier HBO/Neon feature-length film on the same subject.

I stayed up late on Saturday night and watched all three episodes back-to-back of Netflix’s Woodstock 99 documentary, Trainwreck. Twitter had told me it was compelling and awful and hard to look away, Twitter was outraged, as Twitter so often is. But Twitter probably wasn’t entirely wrong. And, anyway, I had actual friends who had told me, IRL, that I should see the film - that I had to see the film.

So, I saw the film.

But the thing is, I’d already seen the far superior, tighter, and more brutal documentary screening on Neon. HBO’s Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, And Rage.

So, I know I’m directing my rage into the wrong corner entirely, but I really do hate the laziness-factor of Netflix being the number one streamer still in people’s minds.

Is it on Netflix?

I feel like this is one of the dumbest, laziest questions currently asked in a white-privilege world. It arrives with the weary resignation that if said “must see” show or film is in fact not on Netflix then the person will just simply never see it – since there can’t be any other options. It brings with it, too, some false and unearned idea that Netflix is the cultural barometer, the yardstick – if it’s not in fact on Netflix then a) don’t worry about it and/or b) just wait until it is…

If you can’t order your product through Amazon and receive it via express shipping is it even real?

How did we get so dumb? So lazy?

Well, actually, Woodstock ’99 was probably the start of that. A three festival of love and peace, as ordered on AliExpress, basically.

And yes, there are far bigger things to worry about. But this is almost what keeps me up at night. Well, it keeps me up at night – eventually – to watch the Netflix version. The inferior version…

I say all of this, by the way, as someone who set up a Netflix account as soon as it was available in New Zealand and has paid monthly ever since. It’s my least favourite streaming service, it is filled with shit – such utter crap – and yet it is the boring old default: Let’s see what’s on Netflix…gah!

Anyway, the Woodstock 99 doco on Netflix is absolutely ok. It dips into the clusterfuck and shows you that it was doomed from the start, that the music was very bad too (not really the point of the film) and at the end of the last century we were absolute pigs.

But – all of this is explored, and in more brutal, punishing detail, sharper, more direct and without relying on the horrid default of episodic documentary viewing (keep ‘em hooked – binge all the episodes) on Neon’s far superior Peace, Love, And Rage feature film.

There we see that the hideous dude-bro culture, the seemingly laissez-faire sexual assaults (hey, if women are going to walk around topless, men can grab and fondle during anonymous crowd surfing clusters, right? Fucking horrific!) and we get more of an understanding of how the culture behind the event predicted, even promoted all of this.

The female acts on the bill – Sheryl Crow, Jewel, and Alanis Morrisette – were all big names but were at the start of their decline, in terms of world-beater status. They had all been huge a few years earlier. They were all mainstream and pop and ‘lite’ in comparison to the dominant soundscape: the nu-metal crud of Korn and Limp Bizkit, the final, strangled wave of grunge remnants offered by Bush and Creed…

The three lone female singer/songwriters were arguably set up to fail, were certainly presented as nothing beyond a token gesture.

You watch this stuff now – as with the competing Fyre Festival documentaries that thrilled a couple of years back (though probably most of y’all just watched The Netflix One) – and there’s some weird fetishisation of the punishing failure. We are clearly superior beings, what we’re doing in our life is better because even when we make mistakes and present as, well, human, we are still not them.

Car-Crash TV will hook us in always. And particularly if it’s on Netflix!

So I watched all three episodes. Because it was Saturday night and I was home and it was either that or sleep – and I figured I could fit in both, since my lifestyle is super exciting eh.

And I get that my anger is directly entirely in the wrong places – but I was disappointed to think that many people outraged by the Netflix film aren’t even seeing how bad it really was; also, that fucking terrible music. (Lol).

In 1999 I was a very young, tentative reviewer. Just getting runs on the board. Writing for small publications around town. Mostly saying positive things, but mostly reviewing jazz and new releases that I paid for myself. The nu-metal genre really seemed to kick in, in earnest, post-9/11. And by then, I gladly felt too old for it all and listened to Linkin Park and Staind and all of this stupid, hideous shit, as an already cynical and jaded music reviewer, getting to dismiss it in 200 words for shits and/or giggles for a daily national paper. Never as someone even vaguely trying or hoping to give it a chance.

But to watch this second Woodstock ’99 doco at the end of the bizarre, disappointing Sam Uffindell political botch which revealed even more Luxon/National own goals was also to think back to what a piece of shit I was in 1999. Removed from the Woodstock culture, many miles from huge festival crowds and the horrible, sun-baked mud-crud energy that transmogrifies seemingly ‘normal’ and bored people.

I was a danger to myself, most obviously.

But do we watch and delight in these car-crash documentaries because we still love to examine skeletons in other closets? There we are helping to chose garments for some monster ball: THIS looks good on you. It’s great to see how bad YOU look.

Thinking about how Uffindell presented so terribly, couldn’t properly own his mistakes, did so with a resigned hang-dog expression that essentially said, ‘you busted me, damn’ and then watching the dude-bros of bad-taste late-90s music get their grope on. It’s a horrible world of white privilege. And its soundtrack is some of the worst music ever made. And I know that’s never the point of either of the Woodstock films, but I guess the Netflix one is, in the end, the documentary of reinforcement, rather than of any real revelation.

Some mixed up, confused thoughts by me in the end.

But yeah, I watched the film. Hated what it presented and preferred the first movie. But recognise, given its triggering, misogynistic, hideous footage, that that can never be an exact recommendation either

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