Speaking of Woodstock, last night I watched Withnail & I for the first time (yes, it took me 22 years to get around to it), and one of its many insanely brilliant lines seems an apt retort to the inescapable nostalgia surrounding the festival's 40th anniversary. Withnail is set in the fall of 1969. Near the end, when the dealer/sage/burnout Danny treats the lads to one of his homemade Camberwell Carrot spliffs, he opines: "They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworth's, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over."
Of course, another end-of-decade document definitively put Woodstock to rest a long, long time ago.
Oh, that is one of my favorite movies ever. After seeing it for first time, I walked, blinking, out of the theater, feeling that I myself had just emerged from a bender of illegal and unwise activity.
Watch it again! It is the movie that keeps on giving.
Posted by: India | August 29, 2009 at 02:52 PM
Saw it with Garrett in the summer of '86, in Cambridge. Could have sworn you were with us! The sound was so bad in the theater that I couldn't understand a word. Had to wait another year to see it again. And really, so many wonderful moments:
Withnail, on a chicken he'd like to devour: "I'm starving. How can we make it die?"
...or earlier in the pub, throwing his comrade under the bus: "I've a heart condition. If you hit me, it's murder! And my wife's having a baby. Listen, I don't know what my fri-...what my acquaintance did to upset you but it's nothing to do with me. I suggest you both go outside and discuss it sensibly, in the street."
What a movie. Of course it's really only a warm-up exercise compared to the writer's next movie...*Jennifer 8*.
Posted by: julian | August 31, 2009 at 12:26 PM