Guthrie, Arlo

Pete Seeger: The Power of Song

Pete Seeger reads The Wall Street Journal! That's perhaps the most startling revelation in Jim Brown's (The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time) wonderful documentary that etches an indelible portrait of an American icon and a global treasure. As a solo performer and as a member of the Weavers, Seeger introduced America to its musical heritage and was instrumental in ushering in the folk music revival in the 1960s. Branded as an "evil Commie" for his leftist beliefs, he is hailed here as an "absolute patriot" and "a living testament to the First Amendment." Seeger didn't call out politicians or presidents. He called out backward policies, unjust laws, and divisive attitudes. Songs that he popularized, or were covered by others, such as "We Shall Overcome," "The Hammer Song," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," and "Turn, Turn, Turn," became Civil Rights and anti-war anthems. Music, he eloquently states in The Power of Song, should not be used just to forget one's troubles, but to also help to understand and to do something about your troubles. Whether singing work songs at union rallies or Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" to schoolchildren, Seeger used folk music as a uniter. The Power of Song is a profile in courage. In dramatic archival footage, he is seen defying the House Un-American Activities Committee. Seeger, never in it for the money, recalls how he quit the phenomenally popular Weavers when the other members agreed to do a cigarette commercial. Seeger was green before green was cool. At 88, he lives in the log cabin that he built and continues to work the land; chopping wood and hauling water. This film also chronicles his successful campaign to clean up the polluted Hudson River.

The Power of Song" is more than a great life story. It's also a great love story. Toshi, his wife of more than 60 years, emerges as an extraordinary woman who has greatly sacrificed to allow Seeger to take his music and message around the world (at one point she jokes that she wished her husband chased women instead of causes so she could leave him). Seeger says his singing voice is gone, but his spirit is undimmed (one clip captures him standing on the roadside with a handful of war protesters). Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, Mary Travers, and family members are among those who pay tribute, but Seeger's own plain-spoken words and the concert footage and performance clips--by turns joyous and profoundly moving--take full measure of the man as a musicologist, iconoclast, and "social artist." One admirer says of Seeger that he stood for justice and had powerful enemies. That makes him sound like a superhero. In his own gentle way, perhaps he was. --Donald Liebenson

PETE SEEGER: THE POWER OF SONG (DVD MOVIE)

Woodstock - 3 Days of Peace & Music (The Director's Cut)

The three-day Woodstock music festival in 1969 was the pivotal event of the 1960s peace movement, and this landmark concert film is the definitive record of that milestone of rock & roll history. It's more than a chronicle of the hippie movement, however; this is a film of genuine historical and social importance, capturing the spirit of America in transition, when the Vietnam War was at its peak and antiwar protest was fully expressed through the liberating music of the time. With a brilliant crew at his disposal (including a young editor named Martin Scorsese), director Michael Wadleigh worked with over 300 hours of footage to create his original 225-minute director's cut, which was cut by 40 minutes for the film's release in 1970. Eight previously edited segments were restored in 1994, and the original director's cut of Woodstock is now the version most commonly available on videotape and DVD.

The film deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and it's still a stunning achievement. Abundant footage taken among the massive crowd ("half a million strong") expresses the human heart of the event, from skinny-dipping hippies to accidental overdoses, to unpredictable weather, midconcert childbirth, and the thoughtful (or just plain rambling) reflections of the festive participants. Then, of course, there is the music--a nonstop parade of rock & roll from the greatest performers of the period, including Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Canned Heat, The Who, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Ten Years After, Sly & The Family Stone, Santana, and many more. Watching this ambitious film, as the saying goes, is the next best thing to being there--it's a time-travel journey to that once-in-a-lifetime event. --Jeff Shannon

3 days. 3-million people. And memories to last a lifetime.Year: 1970Director: Michael WadleighStarring: Jimi Hendrix, Richie Havens, The Who, Crosby, Stills & Nash, much more

1968 with Tom Brokaw (History Channel)

Actor Dennis Hopper is credited with the adage "If you can remember the '60s, you weren't there." As Roger Ebert once observed, Hopper (or whomever) was no doubt referring to the late 1960s. But even so, 1968 was a hard year to forget. Pat Buchanan, one of the more prominent talking heads in this efficient, but hardly radical History Channel documentary, calls it probably the worst and most divisive year in the nation's history (our vote: 1969, when the Chicago Cubs fell from first place in a late-season collapse). But that's a typically harsh view from the former Nixon speechwriter, who coined the phrase "the Silent Majority." Others offer a fonder look back. Something of a companion to Tom Brokaw's book, Boom! Personal Reflections on the '60s, 1968 focuses on this "historic year," one rife with turmoil, tragedy, and upheaval. Brokaw guides viewers through the milestone events (the assassinations of the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the ongoing Vietnam War and the growing protest movement, Lyndon Johnson withdrawing from the presidential race, the Chicago Democratic Convention).

Interviews with a wide spectrum of voices offer a personal perspective on what was happening here. They include a glib Arlo Guthrie, whose classic Alice's Restaurant crystallized growing anti-war ferment, an earnest Bruce Springsteen, and Andrew Young, who was with Dr. King when he was gunned down. An inspired pairing is kindred spirits Tommy Smothers, who, with his brother, Dick, brought the counterculture into America's living rooms with The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. But most effective are the ordinary citizens whose lives took extraordinary turns in 1968. We meet an army nurse and wounded Vietnam vet, who married and now offer counseling to injured vets of the war in Iraq. David Smith, founder of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, decries the destructive legacy of drugs. The program ends, as did 1968, on a moment of hope and triumph as the Apollo 8 astronauts circle the moon, and newly elected President Nixon promises to "bring us together." Leave it to Buchanan to posit that 1968 was the beginning of the culture wars that would lead to the Red and Blue state divide of 2004. Still, a year that gave us 2001: A Space Odyssey, pitcher Denny McLain's 30-win season, and "the San Francisco Sound" can't be all bad. 1968 is an illuminating time capsule. --Donald Liebenson

1968 was a year of extraordinary tragedy, triumph, and transformation. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy failed to halt the juggernaut of the Civil Rights Movement. Richard Nixon was elected President following riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As rockets rained down on fighting men in Vietnam, a NASA rocket carried men into lunar orbit. From music to politics to issues of feminism, race, and war, 1968 left almost no facet of American life unchanged.

Now, legendary award-winning journalist and best-selling author Tom Brokaw commemorates the revolutionary events of this pivotal year in a feature-length special, based on his book, Boom!: Voices of the Sixties Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today. Drawing upon his decades of experience, Brokaw revisits the scenes of these iconic events, pairing provocative voices from the past and present to explore how these 40-year-old moments still impact our lives today.

DVD Features: Interviews with Tom Brokaw

Alice's Restaurant

You can get anything you want there, or so went Arlo Guthrie's song, a lengthy monologue about a Thanksgiving dinner and how its aftermath kept Guthrie out of the Vietnam-era draft. Arthur Penn's movie version, which stars Guthrie, James Broderick, and Pat Quinn, has a shambling, good-natured feel, much like Guthrie's epic tall tale. But as it follows Guthrie's adventures (he gets arrested for improper disposal of Thanksgiving garbage and the arrest renders him unfit for military service, in the draft board's eyes), it also examines the freewheeling nature of relationships in that period--and the toll that freedom took on those relationships. Guthrie is a natural performer, particularly funny during the draft board sequence; but the heart of the film is Quinn and Broderick's troubled marriage. --Marshall Fine

"It is hard to imagine a more beautiful movie" (time) than this critically acclaimed chronicle of hippie life during the late 1960s which garnered the acclaimed director of Bonnie And Clyde his second Oscar nomination. Based on the song by folk music troubadour Arlo Guthrie son of legendary "dust Bowl" balladeer Woody Guthrie this tribute film to "the lost generation" features memorable scenes with other folk artists like Pete Seeger who join Arlo in song to make a profound statement about war protest and change.In the late 60's a changing social and political climate inspired a new generation to create a lifestyle outside of the mainstream. Twenty-two year-old Arlo's journey to find a place for himself and his music includes a visit to his dying father in the hospital gigs in New York and romps with his friends Alice and Ray who run a small restaurant in Stockbridge Massachusetts. And when an incident at Alice's Restaurant plays a pivotal role in Arlo's avoidance of the draft it sends him down a road that he will consider a small price to pay to keep his freedom and his beliefs.System Requirements:Starring: Arlo Guthrie Patricia Quinn James Broderick Pete Seeger Lee Hays Michael McClanathan Geoff Outlaw and Tina Chen. Directed By: Arthur Penn. Running Time: 69 Min. Color. This film is presented in "Widescreen" format. Copyright 2000 MGM Studios.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: R UPC: 027616857644 Manufacturer No: 1001444

The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack

Ramblin' Jack Elliott has been many things in the course of a life now nearing the end of its seventh decade: trucker, sailor, cowboy, storyteller, ladies man, eccentric, iconoclast, and a folksinger-guitarist who's considered the link between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. What he hasn't been is much of a father, and that becomes the poignant focus of this documentary directed, written, coproduced, and narrated by his daughter, Aiyana. The film includes plenty of material (home movies, performance footage both old and new, interviews with friends, family, and Elliott himself, etc.) about Elliott's life, and a remarkable life it's been.

Born Elliot Charles Adnopoz in 1931, son of a Jewish doctor from Brooklyn, he left home to become a cowboy, eventually becoming Guthrie's protégé and a minor legend in his own right who was well-known in England in the '50s and on the scene during the early '60s folk boom in New York. His own irresponsibility and lack of ambition and focus kept him from being a bigger name, and those are the same flaws that have afflicted his relationship with his daughter. "I can't remember having an actual conversation with my dad," Aiyana says, and by the end of the film that still seems to be the case. In what may be the most telling moment here, she asks her mother (one of Elliott's four wives) if Ramblin' Jack "had any talents as a father." What follows is a long, bemused pause... and no response at all. A fascinating document, but not one that you'd call uplifting. --Sam Graham

Sacco and Vanzetti

On the 80th anniversary of their execution, the new documentary SACCO AND VANZETTI brings to life the story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists accused of a muder in 1920, and executed in Boston in 1927 after a notoriously prejudiced trial. It is the first major documentary film about this landmark story.

The ordeal of Sacco and Vanzetti came to symbolize the bigotry and intolerance directed at immigrants and dissenters in America. Millions of people in the U.S. and around the world protested on their behalf, and today, the story continues to have great resonance, as civil liberties and the rights of immigrants are again under attack.

Actors John Turturro and Tony Shalhoub read the powerful prison writings of Sacco and Vanzetti, and a chorus of passionate commentators also propel the narrative, including Howard Zinn, Arlo Guthrie, Studs Terkel, as well as several people with personal connections to the story.

The Sacco and Vanzetti story has attracted some extraordinary artists over the years, including Ben Shahn, Woody Guthrie, Dorothy Parker, Upton Sinclair, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Joan Baez, and Diego Rivera, among others. Artwork, music, poetry, and feature film clips about the case are interwoven with the narrative.

Woody Guthrie: This Machine Kills Fascists

An exhaustive documentary exploration of one of history's most important socially conscious folk singers THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS combines rare documentary footage of Guthrie's era with interviews from the artist's friends and family. Weighing in are Pete Seeger Guthrie's son Arlo and daughter Nora his friend Jimmy Longhi and a panel of experts. The program outlines the concerns of the times through Guthrie's music tracing the origins and meanings of such songs as "Pastures of Plenty" "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "This Land is Your Land."System Requirements:Running Time: 160 minutesFormat: DVD AUDIO Genre: MUSIC DVD/LIVE PERFORMANCES Artist: GUTHRIE WOODY UPC: 636551455176 Manufacturer No: SNP-DV4551

Alice's Restaurant [Region 2]

You can get anything you want there, or so went Arlo Guthrie's song, a lengthy monologue about a Thanksgiving dinner and how its aftermath kept Guthrie out of the Vietnam-era draft. Arthur Penn's movie version, which stars Guthrie, James Broderick, and Pat Quinn, has a shambling, good-natured feel, much like Guthrie's epic tall tale. But as it follows Guthrie's adventures (he gets arrested for improper disposal of Thanksgiving garbage and the arrest renders him unfit for military service, in the draft board's eyes), it also examines the freewheeling nature of relationships in that period--and the toll that freedom took on those relationships. Guthrie is a natural performer, particularly funny during the draft board sequence; but the heart of the film is Quinn and Broderick's troubled marriage. --Marshall Fine

Woodstock [Region 2]

The three-day Woodstock music festival in 1969 was the pivotal event of the 1960s peace movement, and this landmark concert film is the definitive record of that milestone of rock & roll history. It's more than a chronicle of the hippie movement, however; this is a film of genuine historical and social importance, capturing the spirit of America in transition, when the Vietnam War was at its peak and antiwar protest was fully expressed through the liberating music of the time. With a brilliant crew at his disposal (including a young editor named Martin Scorsese), director Michael Wadleigh worked with over 300 hours of footage to create his original 225-minute director's cut, which was cut by 40 minutes for the film's release in 1970. Eight previously edited segments were restored in 1994, and the original director's cut of Woodstock is now the version most commonly available on videotape and DVD.

The film deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and it's still a stunning achievement. Abundant footage taken among the massive crowd ("half a million strong") expresses the human heart of the event, from skinny-dipping hippies to accidental overdoses, to unpredictable weather, midconcert childbirth, and the thoughtful (or just plain rambling) reflections of the festive participants. Then, of course, there is the music--a nonstop parade of rock & roll from the greatest performers of the period, including Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Canned Heat, The Who, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Ten Years After, Sly & The Family Stone, Santana, and many more. Watching this ambitious film, as the saying goes, is the next best thing to being there--it's a time-travel journey to that once-in-a-lifetime event. --Jeff Shannon

Woodstock [Region 2]

The three-day Woodstock music festival in 1969 was the pivotal event of the 1960s peace movement, and this landmark concert film is the definitive record of that milestone of rock & roll history. It's more than a chronicle of the hippie movement, however; this is a film of genuine historical and social importance, capturing the spirit of America in transition, when the Vietnam War was at its peak and antiwar protest was fully expressed through the liberating music of the time. With a brilliant crew at his disposal (including a young editor named Martin Scorsese), director Michael Wadleigh worked with over 300 hours of footage to create his original 225-minute director's cut, which was cut by 40 minutes for the film's release in 1970. Eight previously edited segments were restored in 1994, and the original director's cut of Woodstock is now the version most commonly available on videotape and DVD.

The film deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and it's still a stunning achievement. Abundant footage taken among the massive crowd ("half a million strong") expresses the human heart of the event, from skinny-dipping hippies to accidental overdoses, to unpredictable weather, midconcert childbirth, and the thoughtful (or just plain rambling) reflections of the festive participants. Then, of course, there is the music--a nonstop parade of rock & roll from the greatest performers of the period, including Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Canned Heat, The Who, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Ten Years After, Sly & The Family Stone, Santana, and many more. Watching this ambitious film, as the saying goes, is the next best thing to being there--it's a time-travel journey to that once-in-a-lifetime event. --Jeff Shannon