Ayoade on Top

by Richard Ayoade

Has she any idea how many women would fall prey to your charms if only they were employed to pretend to like you? Flying was like a cocktail party where the guests were so magnanimous that they invited the staff to sit with them a little while.

A time when you could not be a stewardess and have visible scars, even though all scars, by definition, are visible.

an unpleasant elephant in the walk-in wardrobe,

the stewardess is a debutante, a debutante who has to do her own catering and clean up after the guests depart.

Stephen Baldwin as an Italian American police officer who alternates between smiling like someone who’s apologised for farting but still finds it funny, and pouting so hard it looks like crime arouses him,

Winston Churchill said, ‘Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.’ But he never said anything about letting go of your fury. Fury is something you need, and if someone tells you otherwise, try screaming at them.

If your hair’s as high as Pacino’s, you can go from low simmer to shrieking puce in less than a second, the head no more than the dot below an exploding exclamation mark.

some of the classiest thespians ever to avenge the inhumanity of Man by taking the law into their own chunky hands.

Donna wearing a heavy green face mask, a kind of goop, if you will.

The idea that Donna eats carbs is, undoubtedly, the funniest moment in the film. On my first viewing, I was so convulsed with mirth that I almost missed the diegetic doorbell.

TED: Apologies, Donna. But don’t blame me, blame the prevailing culture that makes me its ideological pawn!

You find a scene from the Golden Age of cinema more dazzling than this and I’ll jet-wash your patio.

there, in nutshell format, is Donna’s dilemma. I don’t think even an on-screen caption could have put it more clearly or succinctly. It also happens to be the dilemma of the Great American Dream.

Such is the fate of Art. One man’s Michelangelo is another man’s Milli Vanilli.

To use an expression oddly absent from the narration, Ted’s in it for the long haul.

would assist my mother (a Norwegian whose principal adversary was dust) in decorating the whole house, and while doing so, she would assist me in my understanding that without protracted preparation, there can be no spontaneous fun.

a melange which, by the end of the holiday, would concretise into a giant pine-strewn ring.

The many layers of Christmas Biscuits were separated out with kitchen roll. The kitchen roll showed a festive tableau of Christmassy goodwill, but the grease from the biscuits would soak into the paper, giving the scenes a somewhat sullied feel; a literal blot on the season.)

because my mum always felt cod was ‘too fishy’, i.e. too ontologically itself.

Whenever I see ‘fusion’ food, I wonder whether anyone would dare combine what was combined in our house. Our food was beyond fusion; it was fission.

beyond those common folk who scrap it out in the scrum of the quotidian.

I, too, studied law at university. And to the amazement of all who taught me, I graduated. I have, out of respect to The Law, never practised it,

I am ashamed of many things, but studying law is the only thing of which I am ashamed to degree level.

I had no idea that lectures would be in the morning. For the faculty to schedule lectures right in the middle of the time when I would be most asleep spoke of a malevolence that only became more pronounced as the term unfolded.

A weaker man might have confessed, but fortunately I was still high on the home-made memory serum that I may or may not have made in a lab on the outskirts of the city.

What is his ‘life’ now: a doing room? ‘Now that I’m with you, my life is a doing room?’

There was a shoe shop on every corner selling the kind of boxy white trainers that say, ‘If you see me close to the swings, report me.’

was not even close to lousy with houndstooth jackets.

People you haven’t met are easy to idealise, but people who don’t exist are even better. Once you’ve met someone you’re faced with both the uncomfortable realisation that they’re a person and the exhausting prospect of paying attention to what might be unique about them. Invented idols can be controlled.

désolé

desolee

The seasons change, but Donna stays the same, apart from when she’s wearing fewer clothes.

why isn’t she holding the non-newspaper-clipping version of Ted, i.e. Ted himself (the actual Ted)?

Apart from the fact that the director told them to, why is everyone ignoring her?

‘What do you know? – You’ve had a silver spoon up your ass for so long it’s scooped out your brains

for some reason it’s different from having your cake and eating it – it’s more like working out how to manufacture cake on such a scale that you couldn’t eat it all if you tried.

‘Don’t proof-quote Alain Badiou to me,’ said the guard. ‘I haven’t got the time.’

The deft seeding of this ancient woman’s near-deafness pays the kind of dramatic dividends for which Arthur Miller would have killed.

she fires back, like the loveliest machine gun in the world.

Could this be a Godardian moment of extra-narrative exuberance? It is tempting to speculate, but only Barreto and his gifted creative team know the answer to that one!

Top goes deep within me. To get to the bottom of me, you have to get to the bottom of Top. Two bottoms, same shit.

The whole point of the book is to restore the film to the canon. If everyone knew about Top, why would I be utilising my hard-won clout within the entertainment industry to change hearts and minds?