Rating: 
Summary: Needs to be more like the Monterey video...
Review: At this point in time, they really should put out a definitive release of the Woodstock film and twist some arms to get some more of the unreleased footage out there.
A documentary about "Woodstock" is essential, as is the "Dick Cavett" clips with Joni Mitchell singing days after the show. Commentary from the participants and the planners as well as having Martin Scorsese involved (he was one of the editors) would be really great. I'm sure they could find a few audience members that could also add something more to it as well...(Billy Joel was there, for one). I think that the making of it must have had a lot of risk factors involved as well and has to be as good a backstory as the concert itself.
The Grateful Dead have kept their subpar performance off of the video, but after hearing it, "Dark Star" is actually pretty good, and it's not really as bad as they've made it out to be.
There's very little in the way of CSNY live, makes no sense whatsoever to not include Neil Young. Same thing with CCR, The Band, Mountain, Melanie and Janis Joplin. Definitely more Who (the Abbie Hoffman incident is on "The Kids Are Alright"), Santana, and Sly and the Family Stone. And even the Ravi Shankar performance should be in the box set.
In 2004, some of it can be cleaned up so it doesn't sound so "subpar", but some of that was the spirit of Woodstock when it comes down to it. Some of it should be as dirty as the crowd was then...
However, as far as this DVD goes,if you have widescreen, it'll be great to finally watch this the way it's supposed to be seen. Most of the music and video looks and sounds great, but I think that something so historic can't and shouldn't be captured with just 40 minutes added to it when there's a whole lot more that we all should be able to see.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful and dirty
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: I felt like I was there
Review: This isn't your run-of-the-mill concert video packed with edited performances. This is loaded with performances from the original (and, as far as I'm concerned, the ONLY) three-day festival of peace, love, and music. (...)it's loaded with interviews of kids coming into town for the festival, enjoying it, and leaving it (I felt really sorry for the cleanup crew). A lot of the time, it's a split screen so you'll find yourself using the rewind button quite often to catch anything you may have missed. Interesting to find out that Woodstock was the second performance for Crosby, Stills, and Nash (in the days before Young). Ritchie Havens was out of sight, Jimi Hendrix far out, and Country Joe McDonald a blast. Rock and roll and folk music came together for a once-in-a-lifetime event that could never be duplicated (why did people botther trying?) and, truth be told, I'm deeply jealous of the people who were there. The coolest part of all was when Max Yasgur, owner of the farm the festival was held on, got on stage and said that Woodstock was proof that young people could get together and have three days of peace, love, and music and nothing but three days of peace, love and music. This video is a first hand glimpse into the turmoil that was the 1960's (e.g. older people arguing amongst themselves that the festival was wrong because the young kids were having sex and getting high while others thought it better that they were there instead of being in Viet Nam). You can feel the tension and the too cool atmosphere of the festival through the TV. Ah, nothing like the 1960's. What a decade!
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