1/10
Curmudgeonly bore with literary pretenses should have stayed in the kitchen
21 August 2008
This guy is a real piece of work. An angry, immature boy in a grown man's body, packing all the charisma of a rock, he goes around to places most people would only wish to visit and does his best to be as miserable as possible.

Give this job to someone else who actually appreciates it.

I could go down an endless list of all the stupid things this guy does in his "episodes," though I'll just highlight the worst: Crete. While the locals are putting up seaside picnics in his "honour," this clown has the gall to act like a petulant, spoiled child. He complains about everything, including the fashion sense of the people who live there. What an imbecile.

When he went to Sweden, he spent at least five minutes feigning incredulity at a bunch of chefs (who probably had better things to do than talk with some dimwit American, like work) because they didn't think Abba was horrible. Everywhere he went, he brought up Abba. This is the kind of talk you'd hear from 13-year-olds who watch too much MTV.

When he was in New Orleans, he got upset that a certain restaurant had better-tasting fries than his, so he "accidentally" spilled some wine on them in order to ruin them. What a strange, emotionally unstable person.

The worst of it all are his clumsy voice-overs, where he attempts in vain to add some kind of perspective on a situation he was too thick and ignorant to appreciate. He tries to use all these "big" words in order to sound like an author, but he's really just a pretentious hack whose lack of awareness has convinced him he has something to say. That, by the way, is probably the one good thing about this joker's TV show. It goes to show you, no matter how inept you are, as long as you take yourself seriously enough, the world will as well.

Then there's the way he speaks with local guides whose English is obviously only rudimentary. He'll use vocabulary any writer--as he believes himself to be--would instinctively know will most likely not be understood by these people. Does he care? No. Self-important schmucks like this Bourdain clown do not use language to communicate; they use it to make themselves look important.

Mcg13jthm's review on this same page is a perfect example of the kind of mind Bourdain attracts--that of a low IQ social misfit. Observe how the reviewer attempts to justify Bourdain's sociopath nature with simple-minded, childish excuses that hardly make sense. "Bourdain may complain but he goes through 'a lot' and, not only that, he was 'forced' to do this show but is trying to redeem himself." A dolt attracts dolts, and reading Mcg13jthm's review should let you know perfectly well whether or not you are the kind of person who'd enjoy this utterly useless, pointless show.

Finally, to add a bit of "fairness" to my diatribe, I admit Bourdain would have been momentarily amusing had I met him in a bar. But as a TV host of a travel show whose purpose is to show the viewer the beauty of other places and cultures, Bourdain is a miserable, abject, hopeless, grim and depressing failure.

A failure.
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