An incredibly silly book but often enjoyable. Richard Ayoade, in the guise of Gordy LaSure, provides the A to Z of what makes movies tick. Yes, movies! Because movies are films that people actually want to watch. As contrasted with snoozer dramedies like Citizen Kane. LaSure explores the ins and outs of Seagal, Statham, Van Damme, and other movie greats. He gets beneath the sweaty exterior of the hero and finds what makes them tick. Not much, admittedly, but enough to satisfy audiences around the world. It’s an alphabet soup of clear-eyed fun, with other metaphors just as useful. Be careful though. You may, as Steven Soderbergh reveals in his cover blurb, be forced to admit to having read all of it.

Not as brilliant as Ayoade’s later masterpiece in a similar but more focused vein, Ayoade on Top, but also not as insular as his earlier Ayoade on Ayoade. The Grip of Film will find a place in your reading library. Probably not too far from the loo roll.

Enjoy its silliness. ( )

A very funny book. It’s a satire on American action films and the kind of people who subscribe to their ideals. It’s written in the character of ‘Gordy LaSure’, a moron whose tiny mind exists in a parallel universe where Road House is the best movie and Steven Segal the best actor. Kept me amused for a couple of days. Worth a read if you like film. ( )

I really enjoyed this book. I had previously read AYOADE ON TOP, his book-length treatise on the delights of the Gwyneth Paltrow stinker View From the Top, and enjoyed that. In this book, Ayoade writes as "man's man" Gordy LaSure, a foul-mouthed misogynist fan of action films (particularly 80s action films), the likes of which starred Steven Seagal and Arnold Schwarzenegger in vengeful, violent roles. Richard Ayoade also writes as himself in the book, leaving footnotes throughout as the "editor" of Gordy's work. (It's all very meta.) I was worried at first that I would like this book less than TOP due to its structure: it's an A-Z of film terminology as defined by LaSure, with entries like "Ass, Kicking," "Bars Suddenly Going Silent," "Polo Necks," and "Toplessness." I generally have a hard time reading books that are formatted like dictionaries (and in fact, Ayoade suggests that a better way to read this book might be to pick it up at irregular intervals and read a random passage, rather than sitting and reading it straight through), but in this case I tore through the book in order, enjoying every second of it. Definitely for folks who, like me and Richard Ayoade, have actually WATCHED all these horrible films, and want to laugh about them one more time. ( )

I loved [b:Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey|22593419|Ayoade on Ayoade A Cinematic Odyssey|Richard Ayoade|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1406219876s/22593419.jpg|42074716], and initially found this a bit of a disappointing follow-up. The underlying joke is not particularly interesting on its own, and many of the entries/chapters are pretty thin. Unlike some of the other reviewers, though, I found that rather than becoming tiresome, the book grew on me. I'm not sure whether I simply recalibrated my expectations, or switched to the right wavelength, or the writing actually gets funnier as the book goes on, but by the end I would quite happily have stuck with it for another few hundred pages. (Though perhaps that's not saying so much; it's a very low-density book, with a lot of blank space.) Ayoade occasionally goes for broke and really commits to an absurd image or an extended scene, and I generally found these more ambitious entries the funniest.

(I'm a bit surprised to see that some readers came away offended; if anything, I thought it might have been funnier if Ayoade had inhabited the character of LaSure more wholeheartedly, with fewer reassuring nods to the reader. I guess it's not one to read if you're bothered by crass language, but the actual point of view behind the book is quite clearly a safely progressive one.) ( )