Follow the true story of Jean-Yves Ollivier, an Algerian-born French businessman whose political efforts helped end apartheid in South Africa.
This is a bizarre documentary about a French philanthropist who claims to actually be the one responsible for ending apartheid in South Africa by being the catalyst resulting in Nelson Mandela's freedom. We already learned about Nelson Mandela in Episode 19: "The 16th Man," an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary about the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Being an excellent ESPN doc, the focus was on Mandela's vision and how sports played a huge role in accomplishing that. Unlike that movie, this documentary does a great job showing how bad things were in South Africa. It's graphic, violent, and doesn't try to convince you that rooting for the national rugby team is what it's going to take to save the country. Instead, they try to convince you that a solitaire-obsessed obese man, wearing suspenders with naked men on them, who sits in an armchair made from the skins of at least thee endangered species is batman. It's hard to take the guy seriously given the way he was presented and the message came off as braggadocious (we have the best words, folks) and trying to undermine Mandela's achievements. Everyone interviewed in the film speaks English except for our hero, Mr. Ollivier. That would be fine but in addition to showing clips of interviews with him, they also had him narrate the movie. Like I already stated, it was really bizarre, and just added more evidence to our theory that the reason this movie exists is because Ollivier funded the entire thing, and wanted to as well-remembered as Nelson Mandela. After the review, Gordon brings in his review of Snowden and then talks about Gears of War 4. Next week, we're watching Miele, which is another foreign movie! That's three in a row! When did we start trudging through the bowels of Euroflix?
| Gordon: | ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ |
| Geoff: | ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ |
This episode may contain spoilers for the following:
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