I also informed all parties involved that I would do the same for any of them under similar brutal and inhuman circumstances. Whatever it took, be it sweetheart pleas or promises of a nuclear PR war. I have since dropped the latter approach, as I have been informed by Iranians also campaigning for Mr. Panahi’s release that it was not helpful to his cause. So on Mr. Panahi’s behalf, I have traded in my sword for a plowshare for the duration. Not a problem. I’m not a total ideologue. Just mostly.

This past three weeks have also brought many valuable learning experiences as well. I have since found that Facebook, which I have avoided like the Plague because I have enough on my geek plate already, is an incredibly valuable social networking tool that reaches even into the heart of Iran itself. I have made many new friends behind the Islamist Curtain, among them a Panahi family member, by posting any good news I could find on the Jafar Panahi and Free Jafar Panahi Facebook pages.

You have no idea how badly ordinary Iranians are starved for good news from the outside world today, people. They long for it like a parched man in the desert longs for water. So I scoured the Internet for every Jafar Panahi rally, every screening of Mr. Panahi’s award-winning films in solidarity with the filmmaker, demands for his release by the French and German foreign ministers, and the big news of ten days ago: that Cannes was dedicating an empty jury chair in Mr. Panahi’s honor.

That empty chair is sure to loom larger as Cannes approaches, especially in light of the recent joint statement by many of America’s leading filmmakers calling for the release of Mr. Panahi from Evin prison. It was a bold and comprehensive PR salvo to the Islamist regime in Iran by Hollywood’s top filmmakers, dare I say far bolder than Comedy Central’s recent caving to jihadi wannabes living in their mothers’ basements in New York City. Full credit where credit is due. And I cannot tell you how excited ordinary Iranians were at that surprising news. Orgasmic would not be an understatement.

Speaking of credit, the Free Jafar Panahi campaign owes a great debt of gratitude not only to the many filmmakers who spoke in unison on Mr. Panahi’s behalf last Friday, but most particularly to entertainment writer Anthony Kaufman, who has been working tirelessly on Mr. Panahi’s behalf ever since his arrest on March 1. Mr. Kaufman was also a driving force on the NYC petition committee. He deserves our deepest gratitude for his journeyman work in Mr. Panahi’s cause. Please thank him at his Village Voice contact page. Mr. Kaufman has definitely earned the Egon Snickers bar on this one!

For the record, the campaign to free Jafar Panahi is not over. In point of fact, the Hollywood petition may only be the end of the beginning. Mr. Panahi is still being given the Winston Smith treatment in Evin prison, and the Ahmadinejad regime shows no inclination to release him right away. Just the opposite, in fact. As Mr. Kaufman himself just reported, the state Tabnak news agency responded with “West Meddles in Panahi Affair Again, This Time Using the Prestige of the Hollywood Greats.” The state-run Kayhan website went even further, calling the Hollywood petitioners “mofsed fel-arz” which translates to “moral corruption that threatens the social order,” a most severe crime in Iran.

But the international tide of support for Mr. Panahi is steadily rising. Despite steadfast resistance,  mounting international pressure for Mr. Panahi’s release may yet have a profound effect on the regime. It is sure to be raised even higher with that upcoming empty jury chair looming ever larger at Cannes with each passing day. Even in today’s chaotic Iran, the regime will release Mr. Panahi if the PR heat becomes too great as it did for Roxana Saberi. The regime can ill afford to lose allies like France and Germany right now, and Mr. Panahi is fast becoming a diplomatic sticking point for both.

A note of bitter deja vu. Last week, as I drafted my latest oped on Mr. Panahi at Digital Journal, it occurred to me that a year ago today I was immersed in the same kind of relentless campaign for Roxana Saberi’s release from Evin prison, both here at BH and at the Digital Journal news blog. It was in fact Team Oscar’s Iran trip that drove me for the first time in my ten years as a screenwriter to openly attack and criticize Hollywood and the Academy over their incredible ignorance of the Islamist regime in Iran, especially with regard to the political persecution of filmmakers there. But Hollywood has finally spoken up on Iran, and in many ways my mission here at Big Hollywood is now complete.

Perhaps now that they all know the dire situation with Mr. Panahi, they’ll start taking a closer look at what’s going on there with other persecuted Iranian filmmakers like Mohammad Nourizad, never mind the thousands of innocents who suffer endlessly in the shadows outside of the public eye. For the first time in all this time, I feel like there’s hope yet. Statements such as the one last Friday carry far more weight than the sum of their parts. Hollywood voices do get a lot of press and attention, and that is a very good thing in this situation. I hope they continue to speak out as they have, which I am sure will accelerate in full measure at Cannes. I’ll be watching. But I see a lot of very good things upcoming that could lead to Jafar Panahi’s freedom. Here’s hoping for the best: a free Jafar Panahi!

After his big international success with the superb martial arts saga “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Chinese-born film director Ang Lee continued in the eclectic manner indicated by his earlier films, jumping from genre to genre and style to style. Over the years he has directed the genial “Sense and Sensibility,” the thoughtful historical film “Ride with the Devil,” the gloomy family drama “The Ice Storm,” the homosexual love story “Brokeback Mountain,” and the inept superhero action film Hulk, among others.

This eclecticism and the tendency toward a rather downbeat style have kept Lee from developing a large following among U.S. moviegoers, as has the fact that he tends not to work with the top stars or in popular genres. Thus it was perhaps to be expected that his latest, the historical comedy “Taking Woodstock,” didn’t do much business at U.S. movie theaters in its opening weekend, taking in only $3.7 million and finishing ninth in the box office standings.

Released without much hoopla other than the general publicity surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the Woodstock concerts, the film simply hasn’t generated much interest among audiences. A serious comedy with a homosexual lead character plus a cross-dressing Marine and a variety of other cute, quirky types is just not any kind of an original idea these days. The movies are full of such characters, and we’ve all heard just about enough about Woodstock.

Despite the odd variety of subject matter, time periods, and geographic locations of his films, Lee has in fact been consistent in one way: conveying modern antinomian-individualist platitudes and shibboleths. For years he has functioned as the champion of the social outsider–a position guaranteed to earn plaudits from the contemporary media elite. Thus his Academy Award-winning and ecstatically praised “Brokeback Mountain” was perhaps the clearest distillation of the point of view evident in all of his films.

Although Lee’s passion for individualism to the point of antinomianism has sometimes had very interesting results–as in “Ride with the Devil,” with its open sympathy for the Confederacy–it has more often resulted in compendia of social-liberation cliches.

“Taking Woodstock” follows this template exactly. It assumes the U.S. elite’s accepted point of view of Woodstock as a critical event in the nation’s much-needed process of liberation from stifling bourgeois conformity, etc., which ushered in a new world of greater authenticity that has unfortunately been continually thwarted by forces of repression, especially business people and those vile and pesky fundamentalist Christians who still somehow infest the republic despite freely available abortions.

This cliched and indeed platitudinous notion was boring and silly when Milos Forman brought it to the big screen in “Hair” in 1979, and it is particularly obsolete today, when there is an entire genre of stoner comedies about young people living the Woodstock life while enjoying the benefits of bourgeois comfort and prosperity, plus a wider genre of zany comedies centering on the amazingly free and indeed feckless lives of American young people. If today’s young people are being oppressed by Puritan witch-hunters, there’s very little evidence of it. The public schools, run by an aggressively secular government, are in fact the real bane of their lives.

Thus the idea of Woodstock Nation as something distinct from the rest of American life and in fact quite heroic is simply absurd and fatuous in a nation populated in good part by what columnist David Brooks calls the Bohemian Bourgeois–people who are able to live as freely as hippies in their free time while still enjoying the prosperity and stability of bourgeois life.

No, the real story of the contemporary United States is not a yearning for liberation from repressive Christian theocrats. On the contrary, as the Tea Party movement and related phenomena make clear, the real concern is for liberation from the strangling hand of an elitist government and a desire for a more bourgeois–and family-friendly culture.

In such a context, there should be little wonder why audiences don’t rush out to subject themselves to a couple of hours of cute, smug, elitist cliches. They get enough of that on the nightly news.

Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock,” a halfway competent but ultimately erratic, unfocused story of how “three days of peace and music” came to the small town of White Lake, New York and changed for the better the lives of those who embraced “the spirit,” not only celebrates the drug abuse and loveless sex that defined the “Woodstock Generation,” but goes beyond caricatures and into outright anti-Semitism to condemn those who didn’t.

Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin), a young Jewish man in his early twenties, once again abandons his work as a struggling Greenwich Village artist to help his elderly parents (two Jewish stereotypes played by Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) through another summer season in the Catskills. Their “resort,” a filthy, dilapidated motel, is about to be foreclosed on and probably should be, but Elliott convinces an exasperated banker to give him one more season. But foreclosure is inevitable and Elliot knows it, and while his friends go to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, his dreams take a back seat to this annual guilt trip sponsored by his overbearing mother.

There are probably enough seasonal tourists to make for a nice profitable business. The problem is mom and dad. Her iron-willed hostility and suspicion towards everyone, her inexplicable cheapness – refusing to even change sheets between guests – chases all kinds of business away. And Dad? Well, he’s too beaten down by her and fatalistic to care.

As a matter of procedure and as President of the local Chamber of Commerce (a tired group of seven or so small business owners who meet in a dark barn), Elliot calls for votes issuing local permits, including one for his own annual music festival — maybe a nice string quartet this year. When the nearby town of Wallkill cancels a major music festival, Elliot begins to understand the power of a one-dollar permit and makes a phone call.

Led by long-haired and oh-so mellow Mike Lang (Jonathan Groff), the Woodstock organizers (hippies backed by a battalion of briefcase-toting lawyers) descend on White Lake in helicopters and limousines with military precision. Lang comes off as a shrewd hustler and mercenary businessman willing to put on a “groovy” front if it means suckering the dumb hippies into believing they’re not making The Man rich, but in the film’s best scenes, he meets his match with Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy), a kind but cunning dairy farmer with the land the festival needs.

The story hits a stride as the organizers move in, hand out bags of cash and with real savvy, manipulate, charm and, when necessary, bribe whoever stands in the way of their harnessing the resources necessary to handle the coming human wave holding those hundred-thousand (and counting) tickets already sold. Through the eyes of Elliott, watching the machinations of the impossible come together is infectious but Ang Lee isn’t interested in having us merely observe. Lines are about to be drawn.

Before Woodstock arrived, living in Elliot’s barn was a starving theatre troupe into the avante garde and the removing of their clothes (translation: untalented bums who spend their food money on drugs and now run the NEA). In a truly ugly scene they put on a performance for the locals, including small children, that ends with them ripping off their clothes and screaming “Racist warmongers!” “Republican c-ksuckers!”

This is not only a turning point for the townspeople but for we the audience. Unforgivable behavior is presented as humorous, and this is just the beginning.

With their town swamped by dirty, filthy hippies, their roads blocks and their lives completely disrupted, Director Lee refuses to give even a hint of humanity to those who oppose Woodstock. They, and therefore we, are instead portrayed as intolerant bigots, the kind who defile a Jewish-owned motel with swastikas and “Die, Faggots Jews.”

In other words, you’re either with Woodstock or you’re against it. And through Elliot we’re shown why we should be with it. In a sloppily structured subplot, Elliot finds his inner homosexual and beds down with a burly construction worker and later will enjoy an acid-infused, bi-sexual ménage a trois in the back of a van that’s so enlightening and liberating, man, he finally works up the nerve to find his true narcissism, tell his parents to back off and go pursue his own dreams.

The military takes its usual beating. Emile Hirsch plays Billy, a vet just back from the ‘Nam, man, and riddled with PTSD. The “good” Marine is played by Liev Schreiber … in a long blond wig, pumps and a dress. Of course, Schreiber’s character is the Obi Wan Kenobi of the story, the wise and brave one, the only one who’s got it all together because he’s true to who he really is.  

 
Fine, whatever, right? A movie about Woodstock from this Hollywood is bound to do a clunky, overbearing job attempting to mythologize an event so morally appalling God turned on the sprinklers to get the shit off His lawn. But the portrayal of Elliot’s mother is something else … by far the ugliest Jewish stereotype you’ve seen in a long time.

**Spoiler**

“Money-grubbing Jew.” That’s not figurative in “Taking Woodstock,” it’s literal. This horribly cheap woman who milks every penny from her customers, overcharges at every opportunity and uses the Holocaust to guilt the world, literally hoards money below the floor boards at the expense of the well-being of her own family. And when we leave her, she’s literally lying in bundles of bills, grasping them, claiming them for her own. The image is revolting, the heavy-handed symbolism amateurish, and the whole film just another excessive exercise in self-involved, baby boomer masturbation.