Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Roland E. Zwick With well over a hundred thousand attendees per year, The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts is a famed counterculture musical event held in the English countryside not far from where the mystical Neolithic monument, Stonehenge, is located. Comparisons to Woodstock are clearly inevitable, but whereas Woodstock was basically a one-time thing, The Glastonbury Festival has been an annual event dating all the way back to 1970. Some of the styles and attitudes may have changed over the years, but the spirit of free love, political consciousness-raising, New Age mysticism and sheer unadulterated rebellion for which the festival is famous still remains.Julien Temple, the director of the documentary entitled simply, "Glastonbury," brings an almost patchwork quality to her film, indiscriminately splicing together grainy footage from the earlier festivals with far clearer images from the much more recent past. She doesn't identify which year any particular sequence is from, so one minute we'll be watching hippies and flower-children "doin' their thing" in the meadows and the mud, followed the next by spike-haired punk-rockers head-banging their way into mind-altered oblivion.The glue holding this excessively long, frequently repetitious and somewhat unwieldy film together is Michael Eavis, the idealistic yet deeply pragmatic festival organizer whose running commentary illuminates the history behind Glastonbury that he himself lived through and indeed helped to create. He discusses the changes he's seen in the participants over the years, acknowledges some of the more crassly commercial aspects of the event, and recounts a few of the less savory moments that have come close to spelling the end for the festival itself. The latter include the occasional run-ins he and his fellow celebrants have had with both the law and some of the more disgruntled residents of the town nearby.But, clearly, the main reason for checking out "Glastonbury" is for the music, and, indeed, the festival has played host to a surprisingly eclectic mixture of musical performers and styles in the four decades since it first came into existence. Heavy metal, reggae, acid rock, electro, blues - all these genres and then some have found a home at Glastonbury. Some of the more well-known performers in the movie include Bjork, David Bowie, Coldplay, The Velvet Underground, Radiohead and Tangerine Dream. It's a pity that we are treated to little more than snippets of each of their acts, but even in small doses they create quite a tasty little smorgasbord for die-hard music lovers to sample.

bob the moo It was the 30th anniversary of the first ever Glastonbury festival recently but to be honest I probably couldn't have told you that before watching this film. Sure, I'll tune in to the television coverage when there are bands I am interested in playing but otherwise I'm not really a festival goer. It didn't take me long to twig that this isn't really a documentary about the festival in the way I expected because it is more about the spirit of the place. Now, in a way, this makes for a very good film because it just sits back and pretty much shows the festival for what it is. The problem is that it also means the film has very little structure, precious little insight and features far too many people just being tw*ts. Some of them are just having fun but the funniest ones are those filled with the "beauty" and "importance" of the event – God I would have loved to know how some of them turned out as they got older! Here and there the film produces moments of interest (eg it was interesting to hear the organisers talk about the riot, the security problems and the like) but mostly it doesn't have many good contributions and even when it does. It doesn't use them well at all. This leaves us with two other things to fill a 2 hour+ run time, performances and footage. The choice of performances is, to put it politely, inconsistent. What does it say for a music festival that has been going on for longer than I have been alive, if this film decides to include David Grey giving a typically bland performance, Pete Dougherty falling into the crowd and several other performances that could only represent "choice picks" if taken from a very limited catalogue. There are other choices that are better but they do tend to lean towards the very modern, I assume because the media coverage meant it was better and more of it. However if the available performances lacked sufficient kickers then it could have gone for more of a focus on the scene at the festival.Like I said, it does do this reasonably well in how it just keeps churning out footage of the people and logistics of the event but even this is pretty average. By just showing the stuff that got caught on camera I did wonder why this was any different from the annual BBC coverage. Literally in the last 20 minutes, the film finally gets down to some thought and insight regarding the way the festival has drifting from being a sort of relaxed commune, to being fenced in and more controlled. However this is barely 4 minutes of discussion and it is approached to suggest that it is done because it has to be – strangely there is no discussion (beyond one scene of rich people) of how branded it has all become.Overall then a fairly pointless documentary that achieves very little in 2 hours. It does kind of grab at the spirit of the event in the footage of people but generally it is lacking interest or insight while the choice of performers made me worry about the festival if some of them were in the "top picks" of 30 years! Might be of value to some but you're more likely to get just as much if not more from the annual coverage on the BBC.

The_Void Unfortunately, I've never been to Glastonbury myself; and it is for people like me that this documentary fails. The tone of the film is aimed far more towards people that can remember the event themselves, and there isn't a great deal to learn for people like myself that have never been. I saw this film with some people that had been to Glastonbury; and they informed me that the film doesn't even show the best bits of the festival, as while director Julien Temple is busy showing us, over and over again, that the festival suffers from gatecrashers; he completely forgets about many of the events other than the live bands, and the true festival atmosphere never really shines through. Going into this film, I was hoping to see some of the great acts that have performed at Glastonbury; and audiences get treated to performances from great acts such as Radiohead, The Prodigy, Massive Attack, David Bowie and an excellent rendition of 'Waterloo Sunset' by Ray Davies, while having to suffer through drivel such as Morrisey, Coldplay and Björk...it's a real mixed bag, which could suit a range of music fans - but the director cuts the performances with other pictures and sounds, and it completely spoils it. We barely get to hear a full song and it would seem that the more exciting the act, the less screen time it gets. Throw in a completely unneeded segment about the toilet facilities and what you have is a documentary about an interesting subject, made very dull. Most of my enjoyment from this film came from the hope that I'd hear a band that I like soon; and most of the time I didn't. Shame really.

phyrlp I was disappointed when I saw this film because I was expecting something similar to Woodstock. In Woodstock the concert footage is well shot, with the camera focusing on the band during the songs. However, in this film the songs are constantly interrupted, not only visually, but also with sound. The director seems more interested in what the audience is doing than what the band is doing. Not only this, but very few songs were shown in their entirety and only about thirty seconds of the velvet underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties" was shown. This film is okay if you want to get a feel about the atmosphere of the festival, and learn about the history. However, if you want to watch this movie to see the featured bands perform, then don't bother.