Don’t Fuck Me Up with Peace and Love

SPOILERS for all three of these, one streaming miniseries and two movies.

Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 – I really didn’t know much about this festival, aside from a few mentions of riots and overpriced food and water. This Netflix miniseries was an overview of the entire three days, with some of the focus being on how different it was from the original Woodstock. For one thing, it wasn’t particularly close to Woodstock, but instead at a decommissioned military base in Rome, about a hundred miles away. But more importantly, it was violent and profit-driven. Some amount of that was probably bound to happen anyway; there are obnoxiously rowdy people at pretty much every concert. But the organizers didn’t help matters by making everything expensive and cutting as many corners as possible, so that it didn’t meet basic safety standards. From the looks of things, there wasn’t even any shade, and the place became filthy very quickly. I suspect I wouldn’t have even liked the first Woodstock, as I’m not big on crowds or lack of toilets, but this had all that and more, and not in a good way. As far as I know, there are no plans to do it again in 2029.

In a Violent Nature – We saw this at the theater on Thursday. It’s a Canadian slasher film with a killer similar to Jason Voorhees, brutal, good at improvising, and pretty much unstoppable. Johnny was a guy with a childish mind, who was tricked into climbing and falling off a fire tower, which broke his neck. He was kept in check by his mother’s locket, but when some young people camping out in the woods take it, he goes on a killing spree. The locals mostly refuse to talk about him, and think of him as basically a wild animal. There’s nothing all that original about the plot, but it does somewhat distinguish itself by mostly focusing on Johnny rather than his victims, which means a lot of slow moments of his observing what’s going on. There’s also no score, so there’s no background music unless someone on screen is actually playing it. Oh, and speaking of obnoxiously rowdy people, the only other people in the theater with us insisted on talking through the whole thing, which was very distracting.

The Purge: Anarchy – The second movie in the franchise kind of seems like it’s trying to do too much, yet not that much really happens. While the first film focused on a rich family forced into a dangerous situation, this one deals with poor people trying to survive on the streets during the Purge. There are some variations on the types of killing participants do, with one guy accepting money for his family in exchange for being murdered by wealthy people, and some others doing a Most Dangerous Game. It’s also revealed that the government sometimes steps in to kill more poor people, as the citizens aren’t doing enough of it; and a resistance group also shows up. One thing that was referenced in the first movie but played a larger role here was that only certain weapons are allowed during the Purge, which seems to create a paradox if all crime is supposed to be legal.