Cue the waterworks, here's the trailer for Anthony Bourdain documentary Roadrunner
Film News Anthony Bourdain
If you’re like the rest of us and still not over the death of beloved chef Anthony Bourdain, have some tissues nearby while watching the following trailer. Focus Features shared the first look at Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, which gives a behind-the-scenes look at the writer and travel series host’s life—from his humble beginnings to his career as a renowned cultural icon.
Roadrunnner is directed by Academy Award-winning Morgan Nelville, the documentary producer known for the Fred Rogers biopic Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and 20 Feet From Stardom. The documentary film seeks to tell the story of a master storyteller, through the voice of the man himself.
Bourdain’s popularity was rooted in his humility, wit, and respect for the places and people he visited throughout his career. Bourdain was the “bad boy” of the food world, rejecting the idea of celebrity and speaking frankly about his issues with high-levels chefs. Through his travels around the world, his approach never hinged on colonialist perspectives when it came to delving into different cultural food and insight. He was the people’s culinary expert, putting on no fronts and giving viewers a no holds barred journey through the world and his own life. Many found solace in his ability to openly discuss his problems with depression and drug use, while showing how everyone in the world is connected through the human experience.
His mainstream success started with food writing, he released the book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. From there, he hosted Travel Channel’s No Reservations and CNN’s Parts Unknown, both award-winning and widely cherished series. Bourdain died by suicide at the age of 61 while filming Parts Unknown in 2018. The news of his death stunned fans and peers across the world.
Roadrunner hits theaters on July 16, 2021.
30 Comments
Oh man, that recent Robin Williams doc was hard enough to watch. I don’t think I can handle this one.
Ditto. There were a small handful of celebrity deaths from our last few hellish years that actually hit me hard, and Bourdain was #1 on that list. 🙁
Yeah it was so hard on me because I knew he had had his struggles but he seemed to have figured things out. It’s always so distressing when someone of his statues succumbs to the disease of depression, because it is hard for one not to despair, that if someone like him can’t find a way out, how could the rest of us, who lack his resources to pursue recovery? Bourdain, and also Philip Seymour Hoffman, are two who, when they died, left atomic bomb sized craters in our society. We are much the worse for their absence.
I don’t think you can “figure out” your depression any more than you can “figure out” cancer or some other life-threatening chronic condition.
You can do your best, listen to doctors, do the work necessary to keep it at bay, and things can still spike unexpectedly.
You do the best you can do. And sometimes, the conditions win out in the end.
I don’t think you can “figure out” your depression any more than you can “figure out” cancer or some other life-threatening chronic condition.BINGO.
You do the best you can do. And sometimes, the conditions win out in the end.That’s why I think that saying someone “lost their battle with depression” is a more accurate than saying “died by suicide”.
honestly, i’m not sure anymore he “couldn’t find a way out”.
He made a choice, one we don’t agree with, but it was a choice. It was HIS way out. I know, it’s not a popular view until it’s “doctor assisted”. But he clearly knew what his resources were, what they were worth to him and his unique problem, and i have to believe he made ab adult choice. Maybe had he failed, he would regret. I don’t know. But life is linear, and we make our choices based on what we know at the moment.
I think it’s hard to talk about this in a way that respects everyone’s autonomy. Suicide is, in the end, a choice that everyone has. And it’s a choice that I personally think people should have: obviously the terminally and painfully ill, but in the end none of us ask to be born and should have the option to choose not to be here.At the same time you really would prefer that a healthy adult with a living child would make a different choice.
Yeah, my feelings about his death are complicated by the fact that he had a young daughter and his suicide was reportedly an impulsive act. So many “what ifs” go through your head.
I still can’t get myself to watch that final season of Parts Unknown, and when I come across old episodes of No Reservations, it’s hard for me to watch. Even the Queens episode of The Zimmern List where Andrew goes to Kabob Café (A place introduced to him by Bourdain.) gets me a bit choked up as Andrew and the owner of the restaurant talk about him (The episode was filmed not too long after his death.). Trying to watch this documentary is definitely going to be tough.
And Bourdain’s comments about Jiro’s sushi are so painful in hindsight. He is so rhapsodic about that sushi that on more than one occasion he said it would be his last meal.
The author is right, I’m not ready for this. But I will watch with tears in my eyes and love in my heart. As an aside, the person I feel worst for in the whole Bourdain saga is Eric Ripert. He is such a kind, gentle and warm soul. For him to be the first person to find Tony after he took his life is the ultimate form of cruelty.
I just listened to Kitchen Confidential as an audiobook, read by Bourdain himself prior to the TV shows or anything else.
It was a great book, as I’d heard, but it was eerie, hearing him lay out what he thought would be the course of his life and his ambitions, knowing how it all would actually go for him, the highs and the lows.
A very emotional experience, but one I highly recommend for Bourdain fans.
Did we ever find out what was up with that time he Tweeted “Fuck Baby Driver”?
My guess is that he hated that shallow, vapid movie as much as I did.
Its reactionary borderline racist trash and Bourdain has better taste than that.
His trip to Romania on No Reservations was one of the greatest, most honset travelogues I’ve ever seen. Hopefully his Russian friend Zemir will make an appearance in this film.
Ugh. It feels like I just punched in the gut. That shock still hurts. After that subsides a little bit, this trailer looks pretty good. It looks like its gonna be a great project that honors Anthony Bourdain. I’m gonna have to prepare myself for it. Maybe even force myself to watch it. But I’m gonna watch it.
So damned sad that such a perfect person could be so damned miserable.
My wife and I were on vacation in Vancouver when we heard of Bourdain’s passing. It was so sudden, abrupt and surprising that it really put the sting on us. It does hold one great memory, though. That night we had reservations at one of the best seafood places in town. One of their offerings was a beloved Bourdain obsession: the seafood tower. We ordered it and I mentioned it was in memory of Anthony and our server actually got a bit choked up. Later in the evening, the head chef came out and did shots with us.
Yeah, still not ready to cope with this.I remember my wife wondering WTF I kept watching his show, because she thought he sounded a smug elitist, sexist asshole. After considerable urging on my part, she finally sat down with me to watch the special episode he and his team put together about starting to shoot an episode in Beirut, only to get caught in the middle of Israel attacking Lebanon to get at some Hezbollah forces (Wikipedia calls it the “2006 Lebanon War” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War). That’s when she saw that he wasn’t the kind of person she’d thought he was — that he was genuinely engaged in the countries he visited, and unlike a lot of travel shows didn’t just go for the pretty “touristy” places but tried to understand, as well as a middle-class White American Male can, the culture he was visiting and the people who lived there.
For a long time he WAS a smug elitist sexist asshole, both when he was still a grunt chef and after he got the book deals and the fake started. But he was on the record that later in life he started getting better, starting with having a daughter. And Asia Argento’s involvement in Me Too made him really examine how even if he was never actively aggressively toxic the way other chefs have been outed as being, he was complicit in the culture both by at the time most going along with other male cooks gross behaviour in the kitchen and saying the most amazing thing a woman in the kitchen can do is grin and go along with it rather than make a fuss, and by romanticising and glamorising the toxic side of kitchen culture in his early books and post kitchen career.
And the horrible irony is that Asia Argento turned out to be an abusive monster and that being a major cause of his suicide.
It was in The Nasty Bits where he opens the book with humuility and admits to overplaying his music snobishness and even admits to liking an Eagles song or two. I wouldn’t disclose that myself but that kind of disclosure only comes from deep soul searchin and a confidence to put the “real you” out there because the Eagles fucking suck.
I remember watching a documentary he did about how he ended up as a travel show host, which showed a side of them you didn’t see on A COOK’S TOUR. That makes me wonder how much of the “I Hate Celebrity Chefs!” Asshole Act was an act, a way to protect himself from a life full of disappointments —his working for a series of increasingly sketchy restaurants, his sliding down the chef ladder, his drug addiction, the failure of his first two mystery novels, his getting clean and wondering WTF happened to his life, already. All that fueled his writing Kitchen Confidential the way he did, his own anger at “celebrity chefs” and how being a restaurant chef really is, as sort of a Hunter S. Thompson of the Food Service Industry. (He’s periodically referenced Thompson in his writing and on his shows.)I think, as he came to realize this new life wasn’t just a fluke that would be taken away from him any minute now, he dropped the Asshole Act except in a self-deprecatingly comic way, and let himself experience for a time the blessed life that he never thought he’d have….
The episode with Jamal Khashoggi, who was subsequently murdered, was powerful and absolutely chilling, in hindsight.
Its obligatory to post this below any news about Bourdain related stuff but also if anyone else has a friend or partner reluctant to watch his stuff for similar reasons the quickest way is to show them this:“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
God I fucking miss Anthony Bourdain.
Bourdain helped me overcome crippling travel anxiety by showing me food can be the conduit with which to see the world. It coincided with my new found joy of cooking but him showing me that a country’s cuisine alone is a reason to visit was huge for me. I’ll never forget what he did for me.
My wife still wont watch the no res reruns…The other day after watching earlier in the night, the latest Gordon Ramsey global food show(i don’t know why), I ran across a late night No Res ep in Melbourne Australia….. Jesus, I miss Anthony, Ramey’s show was jarring and semi forgettable, with no feeling for the people and the food of the country he was in, Anthony’s show allowed me to get inside that small portion of a great country’s food aura and made me want to go there some day.I guess that’s what made it such an easy watch. RIP A.
I miss Tony like I miss a dead family member.God damn.I will still watch this.I will cry.