‘Is there any moment in time when you‘re doing something better than watching Predator?‘
Richard Ayoade is best known as a comedic actor and general televisual presence, but it is his love of cinema that seems to consume him more than anything else. As well as directing two feature films in Submarine and The Double, Ayoade has penned three books devoted to cinema. They are, of course, all mental. Ayoade on Ayoade, his first book, featured the conceit of the British polymath interviewing himself about cinema across ten increasingly hostile interviews. Ayoade on Top was a love letter to cinema smuggled in an in-depth analysis of the mostly forgotten Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle View from the Top. Sandwiched between those two books was the Audible exclusive The Grip of Film, and it’s probably the most bizarre thing Ayoade has put his name to…
The conceit here is that the book is written by Gordy LaSure – an old-school Hollywood producer who has fallen on hard times due to his lack of talent and various divorces. The character is performed by American character actor Jon Korkes with Ayoade jumping in from time to time to offer an aside or read out a snippet from one of the many anodyne action movies that LaSure evokes during his rundown of what makes cinema so wonderful. The problem here is that while much of the prose is as funny as any of Ayoade’s material, the character of LaSure is repetitive and predictable, and while his repetitious, misogynist and outdated style is part of the joke, that doesn’t stop the character from becoming tiresome. The format doesn’t help either with LaSure running down his top film tips in an A-Z style that soon becomes dreary and limiting. Many of the jokes, while funny, are repeated many times, and while they occasionally stop being funny and then go back to being funny again later on (a la Stewart Lee), many of them just become monotonous after a while.
At this point, I’d rather Ayoade just write a straight-up film book that also contained humour. He clearly adores the medium and has a lot to say about it. Stop the conceits. Forget LaSure.