Tony: Wut I Thunk

Director Matt Johnson makes some great choices here: three months (a summer) in the life on Anthony Bourdain based loosely on Kitchen Confidential.  Not Bourdain the TV star, the celebrity, the very tragic death by suicide, but just a skinny rich kid who needs to grow up.  This selectiveness is crucial to making the story universal -- because growing up is hard, and learning to love yourself is not always an easy path.  Cue falling for, and chasing, a girl to Provincetown for a summer on the shore and you've got a movie that works best by being a bit incomplete, a bit unfinished, a bit (ahem) under-baked -- always showing more than telling.  Antonio Banderas shines as Tony's reluctant, nearly Puritan mentor who oversees a kitchen pirate crew of burnouts and sex and drug addicts (1975, people).  If not an actual feel-good film, it's certainly feel-decent enough about how downright embarrassing it can be to be young and in love and aspiring to something greater in a world of dirty dishes and crappy customers who wouldn't know a true Lobster Thermidor if it landed on their head.

Five bumps of dodgy cocaine out of five!