Watched it today—excellent documentary on Rush! A bit short [clocks in at about 1 hour 45 min] but it was very well made, lots of background on the band and a ton of other musicians and music industry folks chiming in about the band’s influence on them and the world of rock ‘n’ roll.
Anyone else seen it?
I’m interested in seeing it, but probably when it comes out on DVD. I live something like an hour drive from any place that would show it. I followed Rush quite closely in its early to middle years, so I bet a docu-movie about them would be quite fun.
Just to exchange rock music movies, have you seen “It might get loud”? I caught it the other week on Netflix streaming, and it was fascinating, though a bit slow in places.
They sure liked going to bed early and watching TV in their hotel rooms.
I’ve seen it, and thought it was quite good.
One thing I did wonder about, though–in the scene where a young Alex was telling his parents he wasn’t going to college…why was there a camera there? That confused the spouse and I–it all looked way too ‘staged’. Was it from an earlier documentary?
I saw it on DVD, no local movie theater around here would show it [WV].
I’ll put “It Might Get Loud” on my list of movies to watch 
I thought it might have been from a home movie.
I thought it was pretty good, although they glossed over the fact that Geddy was not an original member (the original frontman was a guy named Jeff Jones) and they didn’t tell us how they came up with the name “Rush”.
The extras on the DVD are a little bit underwhelming, I must say.
I liked the restaurant bit at the end. Watching Neil almost die laughing made me all but fall out of my chair laughing.
It was a bit short, IMO, but it was a pretty good look at a band who has influenced so many people and not had all the hype and hoopla that they could have.
Yeah, I guess, but just thinking a few things:
In any case, it seemed an odd subject for a home movie.
Alex was part of a very early reality show type experiment. There is some footage out there of him in this show. I am pretty sure, but not 100% certain, that is where the clip came from. I can do some digging and try to find more details if anybody is interested.
As to where the band name came from, I always presumed that it sounded cool. Somebody was going to use it sooner or later. Neil mentions in Traveling Music that there were no less than three bands in the Toronto area at the time that used the word rush. There was Rush, Mahogany Rush, and something else.
The movie does kind of trail off in the 80’s, but does a nice job covering the tragedies in Neil’s life. They even got Neil to talk about it a bit on camera.
Now, I will go crawl back into my geek cave.
Do they bring along a slot car track on tour, as well?
Not that there’s any big mystery, but it’s pretty standard for a band to include the anecdote of how they named themselves in their bio doc.
Not quite a zombie thread yet, but starting to emit a slight odor.
I just watched “Beyond the Lighted Stage” and really enjoyed it. I’m a casual Rush listener, but have recently read some of Neil Peart’s books and found them interesting. Watching the film was a nice culmination, and has made me interested in hearing more from their past. I knew very little of some of Rush’s earlier periods, such as the synthesizer dominated stuff from the 80’s.
The documentary was very funny in places - it almost seemed to be a tongue in cheek homage to Spinal Tap at times. I especially liked the part where a waitress recognizes Geddy and fawns all him, while remaining completely oblivious to Alex sitting right next to him.
It’s a really well-made documentary. The guy who did it also did “Metal:A Headbanger’s Journey” and it got sort of OMG FANBOY at points but it’s still a good film.
Alex and Geddy need to take their act on the road, they’re such a great [sometimes] unintentional comedy team.
+1 to this – Sam Dunn’s “Metal” is the first documentary I’ve seen about the 80’s metal scene that actually got everything right.
True, true. His look at the death metal genre was well done too.
I recall he did take some heat for insinuating that all Norwegians are murderous black metallers. But at least he followed up with a DVD mini-doc which explained why all Norwegians are murderous black metallers.
