🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 5 Stars – This book is utterly ridiculous; I don’t know how it ever got published, and I love it.
Format: Audio (Audible)
Read: Oct 2025
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.
Here is a trailer, which will give you a good idea of what we’re working with.
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, 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.”
