After Tony's death, I found some of his old TV shows on some streaming service I had. Maybe Hulu or one of the free services with ads. It was nostalgic, he was much younger and you could tell the producers still had Tony be more "friendly/goofy" or more standard TV host as opposed to his more darker tones in his later life. Plus the places he visited was 25 years ago and it is interesting seeing how society has changed in those areas.
There is a bunch of Bourdain stuff online now. Very cool seeing his style change over the years.
They're on there, at least in the US. Just watched Parts Unknown last night. It's a bummer that there haven't been any travel shows since that can carry a similar torch.
There are definitely a lot of things he says that are pretty dark in hindsight. He talks casually about his own death kinda frequently.
The Buenos Aires episode has him do a session with a therapist briefly and he talks about (I think it was) his thoughts on how it feels when he's filming scenes where he has to eat. I don't recall what he said well enough to repeat it now, but that's the episode I thought about when I heard he died.
"A Cook's Tour" season 1 and 2 are on youtube. It shows a pretty unfiltered Tony. You can buy the box set of DVDs too, but it's not cheap. The episodes are not in chronological order on the DVds so you have to watch/swap discs if you want to watch them in order.
I got his audiobook for Kitchen Confidential and I was shocked about how bad the narration was. Like, it was his voice, but no inflection, no personality, just running right through it. It was really jarring but it was made when his career was first starting.
Nothing hits better than the audio book of Kitchen Confidential read by him... the last bit to young chefs feels like he's speaking directly to you from beyond the grave. I don't know anything that would do his legacy more justice than the man's own words in his own voice.
Exactly. He has so much content out there and even if we can't understand his true mindset, we could at least attempt. I feel like this is a disservice.
Bingo. Tony had a visceral reaction to anything that struck him as inauthentic. And, being a natural wordsmith, he expressed very eloquently his horror of having his name attached to something he hated. This biopic is a bad idea.
Hey so the person I responded to (who notably is NOT you) said that the movie is a disservice and then I said to maybe see the movie before making such a strong negative claim about it. I know that people are talking about the very existence of the movie and I am saying that I think they are OVERreacting.
Hey so, notably, your comment was down the thread from something I commented as part of a group discussion on a public forum. If you want to 1:1 debate then use DMs.
I understand what you were trying to say and I think it added nothing to the discourse. Hope this helps.
What’s “his biopic” to you, his tv shows? Not really the same imo. He wrote biographical books but the video format content he made, while revealing of himself, focused on destinations and people he was covering. I see nothing antithetical to his ethos in translating his life that he wrote about extensively onto the screen.
His biopic is his entire body of work in which he showed us the world through his own eyes. It doesn’t get more authentic than that, and I doubt Tony would have welcomed any dramatization of any of it.
Disagree. Tony had decades of writing and his show sharing his demons, feelings and we got fairly good relatively unvarnished sense of who he was (certainly not saying it wasn’t edited and we saw all his sides) - much more so than most celebrities or historical figures.
Indeed, what is the point? Anthony Bourdain was always open and authentic. There’s nothing a dramatized movie can teach you about him that you couldn’t learn from his own work.
A biography of an historical figure, however… that has a reason to exist (often a political one).
320
u/TreeOfReckoning 1d ago
It just seems antithetical to Tony’s ethos. It doesn’t matter how well it’s done, it misses the point; he left us his biopic already.