BEFORE: Anthony Bourdain and Emeril Lagasse carry over from "Wolfgang" - both men were seen in archive footage yesterday in a montage of some of the TV-stars who have become famous by following in the footsteps of Wolfgang Puck. This is somewhat ironic because Bourdain totally dissed Emeril in his book and his first TV show, but he later reconciled with him on his second show.
Yes, I'm THAT familiar with Bourdain's career, except I didn't watch any of his latest travel/food show on CNN, because by that time I'd seen through his mystique and I'd grown tired of it. When this documentary was released last summer, I was working at an AMC and I made a few friends among the teens and twenty-somethings that worked there, but I bonded with one in particular, who was looking forward to this film being released, and also "Dune". I felt it was my duty as his friend to warn him about the David Lynch version of "Dune", but we disagreed about Bourdain, he was a big fan and by that time, I was so over Bourdain that I couldn't bring myself to get excited about the doc. (I'll explain this further below.) So I boycotted it, but I did promise my friend that I would watch it someday, and today is someday.
This will wrap up "Chef Week" here at the Movie Year, it's been a good addition to the doc topic line-up, all things considered. I'm glad I was able to work these four films in, it's a relief to have them off the board, and now I don't have to do this again.
THE PLOT: A documentary about Anthony Bourdain and his career as a chef, writer and host, revered and renowned for his authentic approach to food, culture and travel.
AFTER: OK, my first beef today is with CNN, which played the version of "Roadrunner" that I watched and burned to DVD. The running time of "Roadrunner" is 1 hour and 57 minutes, and CNN aired the film a few months ago in a 2-hour timeslot, which was FILLED with commercials. I get it, you have to pay the bills, but something had to give, to fit an 117-minute movie and at least 30 minutes of ads into a 2-hour slot, logically, mathematically, something had to be cut. So what did I miss? This morning I had to find the film online (HBO Max) in its unedited form, and it turns out, I missed quite a lot because CNN cut the HELL out of this movie. Either air the movie or don't air the movie, but for God's sake, don't just cut things out of the film at random just to squeeze it into your time available. That should be illegal - and any director who allows a TV station to make edits to their movie this way should either sue them or have their head examined. When I saw that John Lurie was listed in the IMDB credits but I hadn't seen him in the version I watched, I knew something was up.
I'm going to pause here and skip through the film on HBO Max to see what I missed... Jeezus, they cut out Bourdain in France, being bothered by a mime? That's reality show GOLD right there - so CNN killed the film, it's death by a thousand (literal) cuts. CNN, who was the third network to finance Bourdain's travels around the world with the show "Parts Unknown", and this is how they treat their (former) talent? Jeezus again, the man is dead and you're still treating him like a damn commodity, somebody you can control, silence, keep under wraps - eff you, CNN. First you cancel CNN+ so I can't see the Dionne Warwick documentary, and now this? They also cut out a scene from Bourdain's travels in Haiti, where he encountered a number of poor, hungry people and tried to donate the food left over from his shoot to people on the street, and chaos ensued (this kind of echoed a scene in "We Feed People" where José Andrés chastised one of his workers for giving out food in a disorganized fashion). There's a bit of a message here, but you won't get that message if you watch the hacked-up version on CNN. Let's just chop out the footage of the starving people and cut right to Bourdain and his young daughter, sure, why not? Kiss my ass, CNN.
Now, the rest of my issues today are with Mr. Bourdain himself - and maybe some of the things I'm going to say won't be popular, or P.C., but they represent how I feel. Mental illness, drug abuse, suicide, these are very complicated problems, often they don't have simple solutions, and attempts to "fix" these issues often have mixed results and unintended consequences. I know that avoiding the problems (editing them out of your life, the CNN solution) is not the answer, so I'm going to talk about them, even if somebody out there doesn't like my comments or my ideas or my feelings. I just watched the scene with Bourdain and Josh Homme (another one that CNN edited out) and there was an interesting comment - "Nothing feels better than going home, and nothing feels better than leaving home." Yes, that's true, and it's part of the paradox that was Anthony Bourdain - why couldn't he just, you know, be happy? He mentions days out grilling in his backyard, cooking for his wife and daughter, and being ridiculously happy, why couldn't he just stop traveling and DO THAT? That just wasn't in his nature, part of his deal was that he ultimately had to self-sabotage everything, maybe in a way everybody does, to some degree.
Let me back up for a moment, because Bourdain was another one of those people, like Julia Child, Wolfgang Puck, Betty White, Rita Moreno, Jerry Lewis, George Carlin, Rick James and Dick Gregory, who kept advancing, changing careers, failing upward until he was deemed a success. (Meanwhile, his personal heroes were Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson, and those are a few big red flags right there...). He started as a mid-level cook at a NYC brasserie called Les Halles, and decided to write a memoir about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans at a NYC brasserie, and the book was a hit. People were shocked (and also NOT shocked) when they learned that restaurants recycle the uneaten bread, the reason why you shouldn't order fish on Sundays, and the fact that the cooking staff from all the restaurants get together after the restaurants close and eat and get drunk and do drugs and god knows what else. But he was telling his truth, and that was refreshing.
"Kitchen Confidential" was a best seller, and then came "A Cook's Tour" as a book and a TV show - for my money, that was one of the most brilliant TV shows I ever watched, a guy who'd never traveled much being given a chance to tour other countries, with a TV network paying all the expenses. That's the dream, right? That's like winning the damn lottery, and he won that lottery THREE times. But spending so much time on the road torpedoed his first marriage, and then eventually the second one, too. There's always going to be a disconnect when one half of a couple is on the road and the other isn't, it's the rock-star conundrum - one person goes out to tour and make the money, the other stays at home, and an imbalance is created. Bourdain also got used to spending time alone, and that takes a toll, too. Everything has an expiration date, sure, but there's no reason to hurry things along. Bourdain was traveling, staying at nice hotels around the world, but dining alone - eventually this can lead to a desire to burn down one's life to the ground and start over. We've all been there, when it's time to make a decision about quitting a job or ending a relationship or making some other kind of change, but then there are grown-up ways to do those things, and also very childish ways.
After "A Cook's Tour", and all his issues with the Food Network, Bourdain moved on to the Travel Channel, and his second show, "No Reservations" - I watched every damn episode, but then he started having issues with his overlords at the Travel Channel. Hmm, what's the common factor there? I think he would have had issues with ANY network that tried to tell him what to do or what to say. By the time CNN offered him a multi-million dollar deal for "Parts Unknown", I was done. I remember when my favorite band, ZZ Top, signed a multi-million dollar deal with a new record label, and then their music started to suck. It happens - people get rich sometimes and they stop trying, they forget what it's like to struggle and they start phoning it in.
OK, I'm dancing all around it, but it's time to talk about mental illness, depression and such. It's hard for me to diagnose long-distance, of course, but maybe Bourdain was a bit like my constantly rebooting DVR, he somehow got the wrong mental software downloaded into his brain, and so life became a struggle, and traveling around the world became both a solution and part of the problem. Being in a relationship, same thing, it was his foundation in one way but also perceived as the anchor that was holding him back. Starting a new relationship offered temporary relief, but eventually became its own problem. Suddenly the guy who'd burned down two marriages had to experience what it was like to be the one left behind, rather than the one doing the leaving, and maybe he couldn't handle it. Before stepping out with a new lover, that actress worked her way into Bourdain's crew, directing an episode here, getting that particular cameraman fired, and all that is a form of poison when you start mixing business with relationships.
Suicide is the ultimate "Fuck you" move - besides being the ultimate expression of self-harm, it's also a terrible thing for a person to do to their friends and family, who then have to deal with the pain and the loss. What a dick move. Get help, get therapy, try yoga, get a new hobby, watch some cartoons, do whatever it takes to not kill yourself during one of those down moments. Maybe it's not that easy, but then maybe it is, I don't know, I'm not a mental health professional. But I've had my down moments, too, especially over the last couple of years - if you haven't been depressed during the Trump years and the pandemic, man, you just weren't paying attention. I lost one job and I had to find a new tribe and a new purpose and I'm still constantly anxious about money and work and self-worth and my parents' health issues, but giving up just isn't an option, and I wonder why Bourdain did, leaving two ex-wives, an ex-girlfriend, a daughter and many friends to feel that pain and loss.
Plus, that defines him now - his legacy is that of someone who got consumed by darkness at the end, and I'm not sure that's accurate, only everyone who talks about Bourdain in this film kind of confirms, yeah, that's who he was. He had an addictive personality, but was also always joking about killing himself or blowing things up or harming others, and so there wasn't just a warning sign, there was like a highway's worth of warning signs. So maybe he's proof that you can't run away forever, but as Jim Steinman once wrote, there's nothing wrong with getting a good head start. Part of me wanted to believe that maybe he didn't mean to kill himself, perhaps he was just indulging in some auto-erotic asphyxiation, trying to get a better orgasm by choking himself. But I wasn't there, I don't know the details, so we may never know - and somehow in our society it's better to be perceived as a depressive mental patient than a kinky thrill-seeker, I guess.
Look, I don't have all the answers, I never said that I did, even though I often act like I do. These issues of what it all means, how to get and stay happy, how to feel satisfied whether you're stuck at home or traveling around the world, whether you're alone or with someone who unexplicably cares about you, it's all very complicated. But we owe it to ourselves to keep trying to solve the puzzle of our own lives, every day, keep trying new things or finding new solutions, and if one road is blocked, try a different one. Or take a day for yourself once in a while, do something silly or pointless that makes you feel good, just don't overdo it, all things in moderation and balance. And when absolutely necessary, if you have to burn your life to the ground and start again, try to deal with that as best you can - but if you're just a mid-level cook at a struggling restaurant or the equvialent of that, honestly, that's OK too. At the end of the day, I don't know if life is better experienced as a constant journey, a sequence of going places, or by staying in one place and trying to be happy there. Are you defined by where you go and what you do there, or is life ultimately nothing but a series of bad decisions that all sort of made sense at the time?
Please, for God's sake, for all that you consider holy, do NOT watch the hacked-up version on CNN, watch the film on HBO Max, with no edits, the way the director intended. Why someone with an agenda had to cut John Lurie and Josh Homme out of this film to make it safe for TV, I honestly have no idea. You can only take out so many little Jenga pieces before the entire tower collapses. I guess the big controversy here was that the director used computer "deepfake" simulations of Bourdain's voice - because who the HELL reads all their e-mails out loud? - but I don't care about that, the bigger travesty is shredding the film, and therefore any sense of continuous narrative, for airing on TV.
Also starring Christopher Bourdain, Ottavia Bourdain, David Chang, Helen M. Cho, David Choe, Christopher Collins, Morgan Fallon, Josh Homme (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Philippe Lajaunie, Todd Liebler, John Lurie, Alison Mosshart, Doug Quint, Karen Rinaldi, Eric Ripert, Joel Rose, Lydia Tenaglia, Tom Vitale, Kim Witherspoon,
with archive footage of Christiane Amanpour (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Asia Argento, Cate Blanchett (last seen in "An Ideal Husband"), David Bowie (last seen in "Jagged"), Marlon Brando (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Charles Bronson (last seen in "The Sandpiper"), Anderson Cooper (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Bradley Cooper (last seen in "All About Steve"), Christopher Doyle, Adam Driver (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Bengt Ekerot (last seen in "The Seventh Seal"), Terry Gilliam (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending"), Ernest Hemingway (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), David Letterman (also carrying over from "Wolfgang"), Trevor Noah (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Iggy Pop (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Nancy Putkoski, Keith Richards (last seen in "Count Me In"), Lance Robertson, Martin Sheen (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Michael Steed, Max von Sydow (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Hunter S. Thompson (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Harvey Weinstein, Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Spielberg"), Tracy Westmoreland, Zach Zamboni.
RATING: 6 out of 10 jiu-jitsu matches
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