Load of rubbish!!

Let's be realistic.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This movie to me was an eye opener. It bares all. Sure Steve Stills was an established name in music by this time, but he is human too. The camera kept on rolling showed it. There are things in my life caught on camera I wish never happened too.Personally, I love was the magical white guitar Still was playing. It had this vague image of a bird on the pick guard. The sound it was making was so different! The musics: What a gathering of folk rockers. It showed what they did off stage too. Crosby group chanting in a swimming pool. Stills guitar playing by a campfire, and stars going through a cafeteria line.This movie is a glimpse in the lives of musicians in the brief time before the mass produced concerts of today. It catches the earthy feel of that time. Music was the event, not showmanship. Folkie, rockers, and gospel singers all playing separately and together. I recommend it to any music lover.Rich, NW Louisiana

HI! I am from the UK and I have read the other reviews posted about this film and I want to add my piece to some of the comments already posted here.I agree that Celebration at Big Sur is probably not the definitive music documentary of this era, nonetheless it is a fascinating view into this period with some great musical performances, and in a much more intimate setting than the big festivals as conveyed in Woodstock and Monterey Pop. I wish this film was shown more often late night in UK as it apparently is in US ? I caught it only once on TV in the UK as part of a series about the era on TV over here way back in the 80's. I managed to capture it on VHS at the time along with Monterey Pop and Woodstock and have viewed it many times since,but the VHS quality was not so good and I don't have a VCR or the tape anymore. For people who didn't grow up in this period I think this a great watch if you want to get a feeling for that period. I was quite young when all this great music was happening, so for me it was very much an education to see this film and get a feel for the period it was composed in. I would love for someone to master this to DVD so it was available more widely and with better quality, because I found it captivating to see this time capsule of the sixties. In my opinion this film has a different feel to the era than the larger scale offerings of Woodstock and Monterey Pop and deserves its place on the DVD racks alongside them.I for one would love to see it there.Kev, London UK

The Esalen Institute where this concert took place began as a comparative religion institute in 1962 and still exists today attracting musicians, artists, filmmakers, authors, philosophers and other notables conducting seminars and symposiums. In 1969 it hosted it's 6th annual music festival which is the subject of this film. In the 60's such performers as Simon & Garfunkel, Arlo Guthrie, Ravi Shankar, Judy Collins, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grace Slick, James Cotton and even a 19 year old Bruce Springsteen played at various festivals. None of the afore mentioned are in this film. Many luminaries visited the institute in the 60's including Ansel Adams, Aldous Huxley, The Grateful Dead, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Hunter Thompson. As the 60's drew to a close filmmakers Baird Bryant and Johanna Demetrakas decided to capture on film the 6th annual concert at Big Sur. Bryant had five cameras to film the event including himself, Bill Kaplan, Gary Weis, Peter Smokler and Joan Churchill. About 12,000 people attended the two day event so this is a vastly scaled back outdoor concert from Woodstock that had happened only one month before. Crosby, Stills, Nash along with Neil Young who had joined CSN in their debut as a foursome at Woodstock are the featured act still working on their play list. Joan Baez who in her late teens lived at the Esalen Institute is a performer here as well as her sister Mimi Farina. Joni Mitchell, John Sebastian and Dorothy Morrison of the Edwin Hawkins Singers are the other nationally known acts on the bill. Other performers include Texas folk singer Carol Ann Cisneros and the other acts rounding out the bill are The Struggle Mountain Resistance Band, The combs sisters and Julioe Payne. The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Incredible String Band also performed at the festival but are not in the film. in an unconventional stage setting for an outdoor 60's concert the performers play on the pool deck in front of a large swimming pool that separates them from the audience. This is a low budget film that tries hard to be a combination documentary, concert film and art film but mostly fails in all three. It is a good snapshot of 60's love and peace through music however. I would give this a 6.5 out of 10.

This concert film -- a documentary of the 1969 Big Sur Folk Festival -- pales in comparison to "Woodstock" production-wise, but nonetheless features powerful footage of a number of the '60s best, incl. Joan Baez ("Song for David", "Sweet Sir Galahad"), Joni Mitchell ("Woodstock") and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young" ("4 + 20", "Judy Blue Eyes"). Never released on video and sometimes hard to find (it's frequently shown on latenight TV) but well worth the effort.