Comedian Demetri Martin needs to hear the roar of a crowd but not for any ego-stroking purposes.

Martin recalls spending five months on the set of the 2010 Ang Lee drama “Taking Woodstock.” That’s the longest he’s been away from the stage since starting his stand-up career, and he spent much of his down time on set scribbling new material for his act.

When he finally got back before a microphone he found his audience tuned out most of the fresh gags.

“So few of them worked,” Martin tells Big Hollywood. “Not having regular access to stand-up audiences [hurt me]. I can’t do it without a crowd.”

Martin won’t have to worry about ring rust this winter. He’s currently on the road with his “Telling Jokes in Cold Places 2012 Tour” which runs through Feb. 18 in New York City where he’ll be taping a new hour-long stand-up special for Comedy Central.

The former law student is known for his arid dry wit, Gary Larson-esque sketches and shrewd observations. Think a boyish Steven Wright but with far greater range and a less passive aggressive bent. He also avoids the kind of R-rated humor that fuels most comedians’ routines.

Martin recently headlined the Comedy Central series “Important Things with Demetri Martin” and spent time as a correspondent for “The Daily Show.” Last year saw Martin co-starring in the Steven Soderbergh thriller “Contagion,” publishing his first comedy tome (“This is a Book”) and prepping a new animated series for Fox.

Now, he’s luxuriating in the world of stand-up comedy and trying not to let success rush to his head.

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Director Ang Lee’s films tackle a wide variety of ostensible subjects and genres, but they’re consistent in conveying antinomian-individualist platitudes.

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. (more…)

In the late 1960s there were young people in college and starting families, young people far from home fighting and dying for the sovereignty of our allies in Vietnam, young people just starting to see results from their brave and noble fight for Civil Rights, and then there were the dirty, filthy hippies – the most spoiled, narcissistic, ungrateful species in the history of mankind – whose legacy of drug addiction, STDs, the misery of single motherhood and 2 million left dead on the Killing Fields of Cambodia, still reverberates forty years on.

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. (more…)