Ayoade On Top

A book that had me giggling aloud in the waiting room of the Canadian Tire Automotive Repair, which says a lot as the waiting areas of these places usually create overwhelming despair. At the time I was watching some slightly-trained people staring into my car’s innards for some reason, and wondering what they were looking at there (I was in for winter tires and an oil change).
Car survived, but the anxiety I was feeling about having to sell my soul to get it back was alleviated by this very funny, very silly, take on Gwynneth Paltrow’s ‘classic’ movie.
Unfortunately this book means I shall never be able to read a pontificating movie review again without giggling. Much as Monty Python ruined British news shows for me for years, show more Ayoade’s voice will come through anything else I’ll read and his dry humour will make it impossible to take the review seriously.
I’m off to read more by this fellow- loved this. show less

Ayoade On Top by Richard Ayoade

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is a close reading of the 2003 movie View From the Top, which is as Ayoade generously states, “best cabin crew dramedy ever filmed.”

I had never heard of this film – which stars Gwenyth Paltrow, Mark Ruffalo, Christina Applegate, Mike Myers, Candice Bergman and a suspiciously tiny role for Rob Lowe – and indeed it seems to be impossible to find on streaming.

You definitely do not need to watch Top, as Richard calls it, to read this book… In fact, it might be better not to.

This book is obviously ridiculous and very Richard Ayoade (who you may know from The IT Crowd, Travel Man and Garth Merenghi’s Dark Place). It’s a mix of tongue-in-cheek movie criticism, show more generous musing on the movie’s message, anecdotes from Richard’s life and many, many meanderings into music and pop culture to pad out the word count.

I don’t know how it got published (nobody would ever ask for this book!), but I am very glad that it did! I don’t really know how to review this book so i’m just going to say I’ve listened to this twice now and I love it, and definitely do the audiobook.

If you want something utterly ridiculous and pointless I highly recommend it.

Now I’ll leave some of my favourite quotes:

On the ‘brutally direct’ filmmaking
the film’s sustained, masterful use of first-person narration obviates the need for potentially protracted scenes in which important character motivation might be revealed visually. Instead the narrator, Old Donna – or, as she’s credited, ‘Donna’ (Gwyneth Paltrow) – simply tells us what subtext, if any, is not revealed by cutaways of signs and newspapers, expository flashbacks and the cast’s often varied facial expressions. If something about a character’s motivation or a particular incident is unclear, don’t worry; Old Donna will explain what’s going on. This is brutally direct filmmaking. And I welcome it.

‘But how?!’ she asks, helpfully making exterior a thought that acting alone might not convey. Sally Weston seems to look at Donna, and by so doing, at us. Her answer? ‘You’ve gotta buy my book.’

We don’t need to see Donna buy the book; the act of purchase is implied when Barreto cuts to her reading it. Pure Eisenstein. A third meaning created by the juxtaposition of two shots: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Bravo, Barreto.

On movie tropes
“We applaud both her dogged grit and the film’s message: that there are some people who, despite shutting everyone out of their lives in order to achieve their goals, can repair the untold damage they’ve wreaked by making a small admission of culpability late in Act III, followed by a declaration of love.”

On the news
“When my parents weren’t watching the news, they were either waiting to watch the news or recovering from watching the news. The news confirmed their feeling that things were terrible everywhere, and there was nothing anyone could do about it apart from keep abreast of developments. I’ve avoided the news ever since.”

On hair
“The height of your hair illustrates the emotional bandwidth in which you may operate, which is why Chris Walken can emphasise the syllable which he deems appropriate rather than the one that might convey meaning.”

Richard himself has high hair so this is particularly great.

My hair is sometimes high, but it is also wide, and post-Einstein/Doc from Back to the Future, any intelligence associated with hair width is offset by an assumed craziness: you’re the kind of customer who’s too dazed to wipe the soot from your safety goggles after a comical chemical explosion. ‘We’re close! I just need to recalibrate the metrics,’ you say, before collapsing onto an off-camera crash mat.

On air travel
“Fact is, a commercial aeroplane is one of the most restrictive environments in the world. Want to know the difference between a commercial aeroplane and communist China? You can smoke, guff and make consensual love in communist China without fear of reproach!”

and

“This shadowy, depersonalised, frankly militaristic ‘they’ (why should I call the pilot ‘captain’ – I didn’t join his army) is what makes commercial air travel so Orwellian. Say you want to take a nap, what do you ordinarily do? Take off your trousers, clear a space on the floor and maybe set an alarm on your phone. Sometimes I’ve lain down on the pavement for a week, and no one has bothered me. People on my street know me, and they’ll either hop over or take a brief detour into the road. On a plane it’s all, ‘Sir, you’re blocking the trolley.’ Don’t call me ‘sir’ and then tell me what to do! Even the homeless get to sleep lying down. A squatting vagrant huddled in his hovel has more room than the ‘executive’ in business class. How can it be a business-class service if you don’t get your own toilet? Some of the worst things I’ve ever smelt I’ve smelt after opening a business-class toilet. And I’m the one embarrassing myself?! Please. Go smell what’s in the business-class toilets, and then we’ll talk.”

On enjoying creative work by bad people
“Because to be moved by something made by someone who has done something bad would mean that a bad person possesses the capacity to connect to us; that they haven’t, somehow, forfeited their humanity.”

View all my reviews show less

An absolutely exquisite combination of personal memoir and media critique, this unique book goes deep into plot analysis of the ill-fated movie, View from the Top. Made prior to 9/11 and benched for a few years, this Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle, follows a small town girl with big dreams of becoming a successful flight attendant.

Ayoade's satire takes the movie on its own terms, searching each unremarkable scene for hidden meaning and nuance, all while arguing this film is an unrecognized modern masterpiece. Although hardly convince, it's laugh-out-loud funny and the audiobook has the benefit of the author's own dry delivery.

This is an extremely desirable way to spend four hours, and doubtless much to be preferred to the movie in question.

What is this weird feeling? Am I enjoying myself? Is this what joy is? It's been so long since I've last felt this intense unmistakable, unpolluted pure delight in what I'm doing and what im doing is reading a long ass review of a movie I haven't even seen and haven't planned on seeing. I could be doing something important with my time and the book promptly warns me that yes, I could and should be doing something else but then again everything else is so very unpleasantly entangled with nervousness, risks and dissapointments when this book is devoid of all that (as well as anything important really).
Ayoade is like a cab driver that drives you to a cinema, watches the movie with you commenting on everything happening on the screen and show more putting it in context of other things he knows or heard about. Then after the movie he drives you to his house, sits you cozily on a huge sofa and tells you about his childhood. You respectfully listen, have a few laughs here and there, he offers you some nice red nonalcoholic wine from a small fridge built into the sofa. While you are busy with the wine he shows you pictures of planes and his favorite plane model that he got at that place and you nod and feel that it's all good. You notice that Ayoade is actually pretty handsome and that you'd like to perhaps touch his hair a bit. He lets you and you enjoy fingering his fluffy hair while he continues his exotic tale gesticulating profusely (now it's about politics and how he once saw a bar fight). Then it's getting late, he politely offers you to stay the night in the guest room but you can't really stay because your wife is waiting at home. You exchange pleasantries for half an hour more for good measure and in the end he drives you home, tucks you in bed, tucks your wife, kisses you both on the forehead all while smiling so warmly, then kisses your children as well for good luck, throws away your garbage and leaves you at peace. Next day you feel as fresh and reinvigorated as never before. show less

I borrowed this book from the library because so many reviews said it was excellent. Then I started reading it and thought "what the everloving f--- am I reading? This sucks." And about two pages later I was laughing my hole off.

Picture Moss from the IT Crowd having a deep discussion with you, explaining the philosophy, nuance, and style of a really terrible movie from 2003 that only he has ever seen. Thankfully, having seen the IT Crowd so many times, I heard Richard Ayoade's voice in my head as I read the book. It's hilarious.

I would have gotten the audio book, which I imagine would be epic, except that my library only had a physical copy. I'm usually not an audiobook person, but I'm guessing it's amazing.

It’s virtually impossible to do justice to the brilliance of Ayoade on Top. For those familiar with Richard Ayoade’s wry humour, you’ll be able to almost hear him speaking the lines of the text aloud, even if you haven’t purchased the audiobook. Only Ayoade could so subtly invoke the hermeneutical excesses of Badiou and Nietzsche, Heraclitus and Sisyphus, Yul Brenner and John Berger, in explicating a visual text that, at first glance, seems so unripe for analysis. With his directorial eye firmly in place, Ayoade steps (nearly) scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot, through this “dramedy” of 2003, View from the Top (VFTT). Ayoade does not merely mock the crass commercial decision-making that initiated the VFTT film project, rather he show more treats it as one would hope any artistic effort might be treated, as a thoughtful and intentional product of insight, empathy, and chutzpah. And in doing so he scrutinizes not merely one film but a whole segment of the cultural enterprise, or rather the enterprise of culture.

I honestly didn’t think even Ayoade could sustain this level of irony over the course of a slight but not inconsiderable book. He can and does! You’ll find yourself at times bemused, at times chortling, at times anxious that whatever extended metaphor he is reaching for may not come off (it will!). And on top of all the humour, you’ll also find a piercing critique of cinematic practice that would be worthy of the most prominent cultural pundits of the moment.

This is by far the best offering from Ayoade to date. I only hope it hints at yet more and better to come.

Certainly recommended. show less

Ayoade On Top by Richard Ayoade

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is a close reading of the 2003 movie View From the Top, which is as Ayoade generously states, “best cabin crew dramedy ever filmed.”

I had never heard of this film – which stars Gwenyth Paltrow, Mark Ruffalo, Christina Applegate, Mike Myers, Candice Bergman and a suspiciously tiny role for Rob Lowe – and indeed it seems to be impossible to find on streaming.

You definitely do not need to watch Top, as Richard calls it, to read this book… In fact, it might be better not to.

This book is obviously ridiculous and very Richard Ayoade (who you may know from The IT Crowd, Travel Man and Garth Merenghi’s Dark Place). It’s a mix of tongue-in-cheek movie criticism, show more generous musing on the movie’s message, anecdotes from Richard’s life and many, many meanderings into music and pop culture to pad out the word count.

I don’t know how it got published (nobody would ever ask for this book!), but I am very glad that it did! I don’t really know how to review this book so i’m just going to say I’ve listened to this twice now and I love it, and definitely do the audiobook.

If you want something utterly ridiculous and pointless I highly recommend it.

Now I’ll leave some of my favourite quotes:

On the ‘brutally direct’ filmmaking
the film’s sustained, masterful use of first-person narration obviates the need for potentially protracted scenes in which important character motivation might be revealed visually. Instead the narrator, Old Donna – or, as she’s credited, ‘Donna’ (Gwyneth Paltrow) – simply tells us what subtext, if any, is not revealed by cutaways of signs and newspapers, expository flashbacks and the cast’s often varied facial expressions. If something about a character’s motivation or a particular incident is unclear, don’t worry; Old Donna will explain what’s going on. This is brutally direct filmmaking. And I welcome it.

‘But how?!’ she asks, helpfully making exterior a thought that acting alone might not convey. Sally Weston seems to look at Donna, and by so doing, at us. Her answer? ‘You’ve gotta buy my book.’

We don’t need to see Donna buy the book; the act of purchase is implied when Barreto cuts to her reading it. Pure Eisenstein. A third meaning created by the juxtaposition of two shots: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Bravo, Barreto.

On movie tropes
“We applaud both her dogged grit and the film’s message: that there are some people who, despite shutting everyone out of their lives in order to achieve their goals, can repair the untold damage they’ve wreaked by making a small admission of culpability late in Act III, followed by a declaration of love.”

On the news
“When my parents weren’t watching the news, they were either waiting to watch the news or recovering from watching the news. The news confirmed their feeling that things were terrible everywhere, and there was nothing anyone could do about it apart from keep abreast of developments. I’ve avoided the news ever since.”

On hair
“The height of your hair illustrates the emotional bandwidth in which you may operate, which is why Chris Walken can emphasise the syllable which he deems appropriate rather than the one that might convey meaning.”

Richard himself has high hair so this is particularly great.

My hair is sometimes high, but it is also wide, and post-Einstein/Doc from Back to the Future, any intelligence associated with hair width is offset by an assumed craziness: you’re the kind of customer who’s too dazed to wipe the soot from your safety goggles after a comical chemical explosion. ‘We’re close! I just need to recalibrate the metrics,’ you say, before collapsing onto an off-camera crash mat.

On air travel
“Fact is, a commercial aeroplane is one of the most restrictive environments in the world. Want to know the difference between a commercial aeroplane and communist China? You can smoke, guff and make consensual love in communist China without fear of reproach!”

and

“This shadowy, depersonalised, frankly militaristic ‘they’ (why should I call the pilot ‘captain’ – I didn’t join his army) is what makes commercial air travel so Orwellian. Say you want to take a nap, what do you ordinarily do? Take off your trousers, clear a space on the floor and maybe set an alarm on your phone. Sometimes I’ve lain down on the pavement for a week, and no one has bothered me. People on my street know me, and they’ll either hop over or take a brief detour into the road. On a plane it’s all, ‘Sir, you’re blocking the trolley.’ Don’t call me ‘sir’ and then tell me what to do! Even the homeless get to sleep lying down. A squatting vagrant huddled in his hovel has more room than the ‘executive’ in business class. How can it be a business-class service if you don’t get your own toilet? Some of the worst things I’ve ever smelt I’ve smelt after opening a business-class toilet. And I’m the one embarrassing myself?! Please. Go smell what’s in the business-class toilets, and then we’ll talk.”

On enjoying creative work by bad people
“Because to be moved by something made by someone who has done something bad would mean that a bad person possesses the capacity to connect to us; that they haven’t, somehow, forfeited their humanity.”

View all my reviews show less