Tony
In the book that first brought him fame, Kitchen Confidential, the chef-turned-writer Anthony Bourdain described himself with an unsparing sense of honesty: “I was – to be frank –“ he wrote, “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” In Tony, directed by Matt Johnson from a script he co-wrote with three others, Bourdain is all that and more. Let’s add self-aggrandizing and a liar to boot. The film, which stars Dominic Sessa as the then-18-year-old title character, has Bourdain failing to get a writing fellowship, heading to Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod to seek out a girl (played by Emilia Jones) and being taken under the wing by a friendly restaurant owner (played by Antonio Banderas). The upshot is his slowly but surely falling in love with kitchen culture. While some parts of the film do come from Bourdain’s book, much of what Johnson puts on the screen is pure fantasy. Worse, the performance of Sessa never once hints at the wild and crazy guy Bourdain actually was and makes him seem like the most downbeat, resentful and least-appealing teenager this side of the cast of Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
If you look up the word miasma, you’ll find this definition: “a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike influence or atmosphere.” That is the perfect word to apply to the horror film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which was written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun – who uses the pronoun “they” and describes themselves as transgender and queer. It’s no surprise, then, that their film focuses on Kris (played by Hannah Einbinder), a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot a once-popular horror-film series revolving around the so-called Camp Miasma, which is haunted by a murderous entity known as "Little Death." Kris drives to the site of the original film set to meet with Billy (played by none other than The X Files Gillian Anderson), and soon the two set off on a relationship that indulges in graphic scenes of sex and death that may be as much fantasy as they are meant to be comments about the larger message behind both haunting serial-killer films and sexual politics. It’s hard to say, actually, because so much of what Schoenbrun puts on the screen is, while occasionally hilarious, both confounding and, at times, tiresomely over-intellectualized.
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