The Grip of Film - Softcover

Richard Ayoade is a writer and director. In addition to directing and co-writing Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, he has adapted and directed Joe Dunthorne's novel Submarine for the screen, and is the co-writer (with Avi Korine) and director of the film, The Double. As an actor he is best known for his roles as Dean Learner in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and Maurice Moss in the Emmy Award-winning The IT Crowd, for which we was awarded a BAFTA as Best Performance in a Comedy.

"It is of course a work of shimmering, glimmering genius. Finally, brilliant critical appraisals of such luminous cinematic masterworks as Road House and Time Cop allow us to see – as if through a mist – just how movies work and how critics have been fooled into valuing such comparatively mediocre and lame effusions as Citizen Kane, The Seventh Seal or It’s a Wonderful Life – none of which, Gordy LaSure shows us, match up to the high water mark of the great Seagal, van Damme, Norris, Swayze and Statham achievements. Never has the cult and mythos of hero been so accurately and insightfully illuminated, or with such excoriating passion, zest, knowledge and insane prejudice.
A pity perhaps that Richard Ayoade should so shamelessly piggy-back on the talent of Gordy LaSure, just to get his nose in the trough, but I understand that his name will probably get the book a readership that the (criminally) unknown LaSure could not manage on his own. Such is the price of integrity in this cheap world." -- Stephen Fry