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Were the ’90s so great? The decade exerts a particular pull—its fashion, its music, its anime, its angsty shoplifting stars, the general air of pre–social media innocence crossed with expressive cynicism. It all evokes a yearning among those of us older than, say, 21. Name your nostalgic trigger—CD-Rs, Friends, floppy-haired Hugh Grant, TLC, Kate Moss, Diddy, Nirvana—and you’ll find a gang of obsessives on Instagram, on Reddit, on podcasts ready to serve it to you.
Such bubbles bear puncturing from time to time. And so it was that I watched with escalating attention and dismay the new and quite riveting documentary Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage (which is directed by Garret Price and is part of the forthcoming Music Box documentary series on HBO Max produced by The Ringer’s Bill Simmons). This is a concert film crossed with a history lesson, and though scrappy in execution and not the least bit innovative in form, it performs a neatly subversive trick, drawing in ’90s nostalgists like me only to thoroughly relieve us of our nostalgia.
Woodstock in 1999 was the festival’s third iteration—following the original in 1969 and a successful reboot in 1994—but this time organizers situated it on a deserted Air Force base in Rome, New York (essentially a brutal landscape of concrete and fences), and booked a collection of bands that leaned heavily toward hard rock and metal (Korn, Kid Rock, Rage Against the Machine, Limp Bizkit, Metallica, Megadeth). The film deftly contextualizes this decision via interviews with musicians like Moby and Jewel (one of only three women, along with Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morissette, performing at the festival) and critics such as Steven Hyden, Wesley Morris, and Maureen Callahan. They remind us what the end of the ’90s was really like: a moment when whatever pure thing grunge and Nirvana had represented was commercialized into a wave of entitled anger.
This anger was very, very white. The hundreds of thousands who descended that summer weekend for three days of bands and debauchery were, for the most part, a crew of juiced-up, amped-up, backward-baseball-hat-wearing young white men. The homogeneity of the crowd, the absolute sea of white faces that roars for each band and convulses with each nu-metal bass drop, is chilling. Even if you vaguely remember liking some of the music you’re hearing, you think: Uh-oh.
The film, as ominous as a horror movie, chronicles what went down amid the oppressive heat, the porta-potty filth, the extortionate prices for bottled water, the likes of Fred Durst exhorting the crowd to “break stuff,” the riots, accounts of sexual assaults, and death. By day three, with fires burning in the crowd and the Red Hot Chili Peppers comparing the scene approvingly to Apocalypse Now, the sense of a forgettable American cultural era descending to its nadir is inescapable.
It’s a fascinating two hours and just one thing to fill your weekend with. Here are a few more:
Yesterday the Maori family drama arrived on Netflix, adapted from author Patricia Grace’s eponymous 1992 novel. It follows three cousins raised under vastly different circumstances and their journey to finally reconnect decades later. Directed by Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace Smith, Cousins is only the second dramatic feature written and directed by Maori women.
The latest from M. Night Shyamalan is now in theaters, starring Gael García Bernal, Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps, Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie, and Abbey Lee. In it, a couple on vacation with their children visits a hidden beach where they and a few other tourists all rapidly begin to age. Shyamalan adapted the story from the 2010 graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and the illustrator Frederik Peeters.
For those who missed the Olympic opening ceremony this morning, NBC will air it again in prime time tonight at 7:30 p.m. ET, followed by a special edition of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. This weekend, fans can tune in for competitions in gymnastics, swimming, soccer, basketball, diving, and fencing, among others. Stream the Games live on Peacock, NBCOlympics.com, the NBC Sports App, and FuboTV.