Candy colored rock duo, The White Stripes toured across Canadian 2007 and when we say “across,” we mean it. The pair covered the entire nation, even hitting wintry cities that not even most big Canadian acts bother to play (too cold, too far off the regular concert tour path).
Each gig they played somewhere off-beat and did something special. As the TIFF site notes:
“That meant rocking out on a city bus in Winnipeg, a bowling alley in Saskatoon, a youth drop-in centre in Edmonton and a YMCA day camp in Toronto. In Charlottetown, they gig on a boat in the harbour. In St. John’s, Newfoundland, they perform a concert of exactly one note.”
Music video director Emmett Malloy (Silversun Pickups, Weezer, Wolfmother, Metallica, Avril Lavigne; one half of the video directors team the Malloys) captured the experience and distilled it into the 93 minute film, “The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights” which made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
Now a trailer has been finally released and we’ve got a say, as people who have largely become tired of concert film documentaries, that it looks pretty damn good (one of our friends saw it there and said it was surprisingly great). It’s also very cool of the band to play places like the East Coast in Canada and the Northern Territories, like as we said, nobody ever plays those towns unless you’re from there.
No release date yet, but it doesn’t sound like the film will be making a theatrical run. Instead, one can pre-order the DVD on the White Stripes’ website and the box sets — which are fairly expensive, but contain a plethora of goodies if you’re a fan of the band — will be delivered “around March 16, 2010,” which will make that about as an official release date as you’re going to get. Who knows, maybe the film will hit NY/LA in limited release around that time. Here’s the new trailer.