Rush is coming to movie theaters in RUSH: Cinema Strangiato 2019. On Friday, August 21st, the film will be coming to theaters for one night only. The project is suspected to make up for the Canadian trio’s absence.
The watch group’s performance of “Distant Early Warning” here.
Cinema Strangiato opens with an extended sequence about Lee’s bass collection, promoting Geddy Lee’s Big Beautiful Book of Bass, which came out in December. Another highlight includes a performance of “Losing It” in Newark, N.J., with Jonathan Dinklage, a violinist from the 2012 Clockwork Angels Tour, while other rockers such as Tom Morello and his wife Denise, Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan and producer Nick Raskulinecz tout Rush’s virtues and influence in interview clips.
“I think every Rush fan believes that while the tours might be over, the celebration of the band is not,” says Adam Jones of Nashville’s ALJ Innovations, who edited Cinema Strangiato. “They’re just as strong and powerful now as they were in 1974, when the first album came out. We just wanted to give fans a pretty unique experience.”
“We’ve wanted to get R40 Live on the big screen for a really long time because it’s such a big and boisterous production. It belongs on the big screen,” Jones says. When Trafalgar Releasing presented the opportunity for a theater event, Jones says he, Time Stand Still director Dale Heslip and Allan Weinrib (Rush bassist Geddy Lee’s brother and R40 producer) “kind of stepped back and saw we had all this unused footage from the documentary and all this amazing performance footage. We thought to dive in and try to marry those together a bit.”
“I wanted to further the message that was started with the first documentary, Beyond the Lighted Stage (2010),” Jones explains. “Rush’s giant base of fans can be pretty quirky and pretty fanatical, and not just limited to the everyday folks. Big rock stars can get giddy about Rush, just like fans.”
Jones, a Rush fan himself who worked at Rounder Records while the band was signed there, is hoping Cinema Strangiato will be just the first of many “posthumous” film projects culled from Rush’s vaults. “After this we’ll go back and see what we’ve got and assess for the next (possibility),” he says. “This is a good start, and I hope the fans enjoy what we’ve done and want more so we can look forward to the next years of this.”
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