Monday, March 10, 2008

Kiefer hanging out with Rocco & the Boys


A few years back Keifer Sutherland spent his Christmas vacation in Europe acting as catalyst, roadie, celebrity tour manager and big fan for a band on his sideline record label. It was captured on HD video and is an intriguing document on many levels. I don't ever recall seeing a famous person dealing with mundane stuff like trying to find his cell phone. It is kind of refreshing. At one point, filmmaker Manu Boyer asks why he lets him film him in such uninhibited fashion doing such stunts as diving into a Christmas tree. "I'm not sure." Later he tells about a phone call to his mother that he made a few days earlier "Have fun but remember now you're 39." And in the next scene he is getting a tattoo.

The title of this film and the inscrption of Keifer's new tattoo (in Icelandic runes) is I Trust You To Kill Me
 It is also a song written and performed by the other key subject in the film, Rocco DeLuca, a very intense musician who plays electrified dobro. Rocco and his band, The Burden, pull out a kind of from the heart highly emotion-laden piedmont blues seasoned rock and roll. By the end of the film, I found myself liking this band a fair amount. There is a Ben Harper like audience for Rocco and the Burden out there, and Sutherland is out there trying to find their audience, first in Japan on a 24 promotional tour (on the bonus features of the DVD) and then to Europe during Christmas through New Years with the band.

We see the band in London with an audience who don't really respond to Rocco's music. Then there is a wild night in Dublin, where a 20 Euro cover has Sutherland worried that no one was going to show up, so arranges for a free show that turns out to be quite a success. And then to gigs in Iceland and Berlin.

There are some annoyances in the film, like falling back on the film crew waking folks up in their hotel rooms, but I Trust You to Kill Me moves along nicely and you get a sense that this is more than Keifer with a vanity project, it is something he believes in and, why not? We all have daydreams about the kind of autonomy financial well-being and recognition might bring us. And it is also rather nice to see that even one of the most recognized people in the world gets a little extended. He can always find his charger, but has no clue where cell phone, or his wallet might be.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:42 PM
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