roadrunner: a movie about anthony bourdain - en

i have recently read kitchen confidential from anthony bourdain and couldn’t find the hype i have anticipated while i was reading it. with watching this mediocre yet explanatory documentary, i understand why i was disappointed by his book.

with it being not a vivid memory, i remember watching bourdain, sitting in my living room as a really small kid, my parents were watching his shows from tv and i was sometimes accompanying them. this is the first bourdain moment in my mind and my parents were enjoying his show quite a lot.

frankly, i don’t know how, i encountered this interesting, funny and exciting guy again my teenage years somehow. maybe through the simpsons or the big short cameos, i don’t remember well because i didn’t consumed his content much but always found his energy exciting and inviting. he was one of the best portrayals of a television storyteller born for travelling, experiencing and tasting in my humble opinion. like i wrote above, with this film, i realized i liked the traveller and tv man bourdain, not the chef one much because his book felt repetitive, sometimes unnecessarily irritating and often exaggerated.

roadrunner is quite far from being a perfect documentary, especially considering it has been filmed for and after suicide of a hard-to-get-along person specifically. last 30-40 minutes of the film doesn’t feel right most of the times i can easily advocate. it feels like second wife of him was the “perfect one”, asia argento is a cheating evil woman and bourdain just became a bossy-bitchy guy after meeting her. while i can easily say, even the look of asia argento (lol, and maybe his father’s too) is a bit uncanny. i just don’t like how she looks but it’s not important at all of course. i didn’t know she cheated on him though but apparently it’s only the beginning. while the documentary does not show this particular incident, i learnt that asia argento also had sex with an underage boy in a movie set. it’s just brutally disappointing from a pioneer for a metoo movement as you also can guess. i didn’t know though argento was one of the sparks for metoo and accused harvey weinstein for raping in front of hundreds of artists in cannes. uffizi shots after those scenes were brilliant, i also didn’t know bourdain became a women rights supporter as his weinstein-victim girlfriend.

i told you that i liked the experiencer, storyteller, adventurer, taster bourdain. you can keep the gritty and crazy chef bourdain to yourself. in his tv shows he is always political, he is usually brave enough to bring some eerie and controversial stuff on screens. as far as i remember he talked about kurds and gezi parkı incidents in his turkey episodes. overall, i am happy this film is didn’t trapped itself into random people from his personal life or his coworkers talk about him only. maybe 1/3 of it is still people talking to cameras but rest was a delicate compilation of his shows and personal life. so yeah, i enjoyed this film and can recommend if you want to get the know the tony bourdain better. it won’t be so hard to distinguish and ignore the weak parts about it anyway.

oh, i was not expecting josh homme being close friends with bourdain at all either. he brought a smile on my face and a nice energy to the whole documentary in his limited minutes.

short parts where bourdain was walking by the beach in massachusetts were particularly beautiful scenes as well and reminded me beginning of his book i recently read.

finally, dear chef, anemone is an excellent song to have as a favourite.

cheers and rest in peace.