Once in awhile, a person comes along who seems to be good at everything...acting, comedy, music, film-making...the more you hear about them, the more impressed you become. That's how I've grown to feel about Steve Martin over the years. From watching his stand up routine in third grade and loving it...to finding his older, more understated routines on an album and loving them even more. From discovering he could write jokes and novels and plays...to seeing him embrace the banjo as the centerpiece of his act once and for all.
Over the last few years, I've grown to love Richard Ayoade in the same way. Do you know him? You should. If you haven't watched the IT Crowd (British sitcom, and the buzz is that it's leaving Netflix Instant soon), you must. His character Maurice Moss is one of the best ever. Chris O'Dowd is hilarious in it too...but we're not talking about him today. We're talking about Richard and his amazing afro.
Besides mastering this character and numerous unique others, he wrote and directed his own movie, Submarine,
and many music videos for Vampire Weekend, Arctic Monkeys and
the Yeah Yeah Yeahs: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo7ZIxuf58UNwDBL4GivgktOcpAWqn1z0
In the last few years, he has emerged in some American movies too. His face has become more familiar. And that's good, but it's important to me that you love him. Do you loooove him?
He's just a delight.
And if you don't agree, that's okay.
Probably you just don't know him like I do.
I spend an inordinate amount of time picturing coiling these curls around my fingers,
not because I have a crush on him, just because obviously God made them for that.
*Addendum to this previous post from 2015
Last night I watched The Double staring Jesse Eisenberg. It was a quick, off-hand recommendation by a coworker. I stumbled into it knowing nothing besides: Eisenberg and a thriller with a twist.
It was brilliant, weirdly Soviet feeling (I think...I'm not sure what that means because I'm crap at history), unique, haunting, darkly funny and lovely.
Because there were cameos by two The IT Crowd actors, I looked it up today.
I discovered it was:
1) Based on the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky whom I love.
2) It was adapted and directed by Ayoade.
3) I cannot get these words left-justified, so they are centered.
That's how Ayoade is for me. You sense something is clever, deep, funny and lovely...you can almost feel something around the edges about it that is yours.
And then you discover it's his,
or Dosteovsky's,
or Steve Martin's,
or at least that's how it is for me.
And it's nice.
And I love them all over again.