big river man
Last night we watched Big River Man, a documentary about this Slovenian guy who has been swimming the length of the longest rivers in the world (Mississippi, Yangtze, Amazon). This sounds like one of those iron-man athlete flicks, but the guy doing this is a 40-something, overweight alcoholic. The film was rather surreal. The guy doing all the swimming had very little to say, and most of the narration and dialogue was coming from his son, and others in the team that supported his efforts. At numerous points during the film, they kept highlighting the poor state of health that the guy was in (infections, organ failure, madness), yet they continued to try to push that he was some heroic figure who was rising above all of those obstacles to pull off these amazing accomplishments. Instead, he just came across as this unstable nutjob who had supposedly suffered a lot of physical and mental abuse while he was a child. Also, the soundtrack to the film was all over the map (classical, new age, heavy metal), and was as frequently inappropriate to the subject matter as appropriate. The film wasn't bad, but I got the distinct impression that we were supposed to be very impressed by the guy's accomplishments, when instead I was horrified that such an unstable person was being taken advantage of under the guise of fame.