TONY - The Popcorn Junkies Movie Review (SPOILERS)

I know it's one of those film titles that runs the risk of being eminently forgettable because every time I keep telling someone, oh, you must go and see the new film, Tony, people keep saying, even when I've just said Tony, they say, what's the name of the film again? because it feels like you're not really talking about a film.

So this is Tony.

This is an A24 biopic, though it is not a cradle to grave biopic.

This is a section of the chef and writer Anthony Bourdain's life From circa going to college age through to early 20s, first job in a kitchen, all the rest of it.

And his kind of teen coming of age rites of passage emergence into the realms and world of cookery, chefery, violent and aggressive and drug taking and rule breaking culinary culture.

sort of rules and regulations of kitchenness.

He wrote a very famous book, Kitchen Confidential.

And I know that Anthony Bourdain is one of those chefs.

If I was honest, my perception of Anthony Bourdain before I looked into him was one of taciturn angry sort of a bit kind of counter beat beat poet counterculture aggressive and the kind of guy you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of in a kitchen and there are many of those types in the world of uh of cookery and cooking and restaurants and chefs and all the rest of it chefery can be a very sort of masculine well it is a very masculine adrenalized kind of misogynist kind of You know, you're a fine line between chopping carrots and stabbing people in the neck.

And really, this film gives us a sense of that very much so.

One thing that we do want to say right at the outset here about Anthony Bourdain in his later life was that he was one of the few, if not one of the only, cookery writer chefs

who

threw his focus or lens on the experience, plight and the culinary heritage and life, if you like, of the Palestinians when he filmed in the Middle East.

And this film isn't, as I say, his whole life, because, of course, he tragically took his life only a couple of years ago.

But I know that for numerous people, he was their go to.

He was their sort of cause celeb.

He was there, not Gordon Ramsay, but he was the cool end of sinewy masculinity, ADHD, because I genuinely am of the belief that many, many chefs, many people who work in kitchens are ADHD in extremis and they find a real outlet in their food.

So, yeah, I went into this thinking, OK, well, you know, I didn't realise it was only going to be a slither of his life.

But it's not a film that suffers for that.

And I was trying to say when selling this to people, saying, oh, you must go and see this film.

This is a really adrenalised and intimate and universal.

So you don't my point here is you don't need to be a fan of Anthony Bourdain.

You don't need to be particularly a fan of food because it doesn't lose itself in the character of Anthony and in terms of what he became in his life.

nor does it lose itself in the sort of foodery.

I mean, I like food.