My Generation Movie Review

Barbara Kopple manages to damn culture and the counterculture, making enemies of the whole world, with her lambasting of the Woodstock phenomenon in My Generation. Through the music festival's three incarnations so far (1969, 1994, and 1999), the highs and lows of the events are tracked. Of course, the way Kopple shows it (and I'm with her -- I'd never go to one of these things), it's mostly lows. If she isn't showing the riots, arsons, lootings, and overdoses of the crowd, she's railing against the corporate greed underlying the festival ($135 to $150 for tickets? A $7 slushee? After Pepsi shells out $5 million for sponsorship rights?) -- all under the guise of documentarian neutrality. Kopple's opinion may shine through in color, but that doesn't make it wrong. At two hours, My Generation is way too long (do we really need that much Limp Bizkit footage?), but it's still an eye-opening look into the corporate politics of the youth culture.