Ashes to Ashes bashing

 

I thought it might be fun to try and get the first review of the new BBC series Ashes to Ashes out there, or at any rate the first review by a member of the public without access to a preview disc of the show.

This means I’ll be, to some extent, writing this as I watch it. So it won’t be considered, but it WILL be fresh. Obviously this isn’t ideal, so if you don’t agree with me, you can put it down to the fact that I’m not watching properly.

This is the follow-up series to the very popular Life On Mars, in which a rodent-faced 21st century policeman (man, that 21st century thing STILL sounds futuristic to me, I’m oooold) finds himself stuck in a ’70s cop show. LOM had vigour and production values and a great array of pop tunes and most of all Philip Glenister as the scowling copper, modelled clearly on John Thaw’s magnificently shouty turn in The Sweeney (cockney rhyming slang lesson 1: Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad, which for some reason was the name of a particular brigade of rapid-response coppers, although they did not actually fly).

LOM, however, suffered from an over-extended one-joke concept and a gaggle of writers who evidently couldn’t think of a way to finish it. Series one mostly coasted along on vulgar energy, series two choked on several Scooby Doo one-suspect storylines and a final episode which, while snazzily shot and cut, left most fans disappointed and confused.

So what of the follow-up, which takes a modern female cop to the ’80s? The idea is kind of trashy, a straight reprise of the original. The execution is very stylish indeed. London looks glamorous and exotic, which is a novelty. The direction is even more pumped-up and masculine than ever. Largesse has been flung at the thing. 

Keeley Hawes (met her once, she’s very nice) has some rather unplayable and crappy comedy to fight through, with a lot of monologuing and pseudo-modern jargon (for some reason, the writers prefer overplaying the modern dialect rather than going for convincing ’80s slang). Maybe it’s just impossible to say “The mind fashions conduits to the real world,” while styled as Kelly LeBroq in WEIRD SCIENCE and really emerge with dignity wholly intact.

K. Hawes, a former model, keeps losing consciousness, maybe because the interstitial hallucinations are more fun that the bog-standard cop antics. Keeley is almost too beautiful to convince as a cop, since we’re meant to care about authenticity in this country. It’s kind of nice to not have to.

Hoorah! Zippy and George from vintage kids’ show Rainbow just turned up in a psychedelic dream sequence, along with a David Bowie Pierrot from the original “Ashes to Ashes” song video. The show, like its predecessor, is very good at disarming criticism by throwing in lots of things my generation, and younger, like to see. In this case, glove puppets and scary clowns.

Help, am in danger of losing track of the actual crime plot! This is why this whole simultaneous-reviewing thing is probably a bad idea. There isn’t MUCH plot, mind you, this being the pilot that sets up the whole time-travel concept and tries to tie it in with the previous series’ loose ends.

A good moment in which a message on a blackboard is partially occluded, reversing its meaning — Fiona points out that this is borrowed from NIGHT OF THE EAGLE, in which Peter Wyngarde’s body turns “I do not believe” into “I believe”.

I wish other TV shows were this energetically and inventively directed. I wish this one was better written. In defiance of sense, our protagonist runs around in stay-up stockings and walks into the bad guy’s lair without backup.

“La Wally” on the soundtrack, that takes me back to DIVA. A bit of routine Unresolved Sexual Tension is lowered, creaking, into the fray by block and tackle.

The plot seems to have stopped. No, wait, it’s back. La Keeley wants to wrap up the case so she can get back to her own time. It’s pretty clear that ain’t going to work.

Fight scene with lesser-known Duran Duran track as accompaniment. W.P.C. is kidnapped.

“Right — let’s fire up the Quattro,” says Glenister.

“I Fought the Law” by The Clash makes an inevitable appearance on the soundtrack, although I think that’s more a ’70s track. Now it’s the shooty-gun bit. “No More Heroes” and a superbly cheeky shot of the macho cops in front of Tower Bridge.

The addiction to celebrating police brutality, wrapped up in genre conventions, is as worrisome as ever. The plot for the rest of the series is set up now, with a mystery about Hawes’ parents to be solved, and a fairly strong suggestion that this character will actually effect a successful return to the modern age, unlike her LOM predecessor.

Fade out to Roxy Music and green ’80s computer-screen credits. Fiona very excited by the lettering.

If I were watching fresh, I’d be quite prepared to overlook the shoddy dialogue and discomfort about politics, because the sense of momentum and style overkill are so winning. And the plot strands left dangling offer some intrigue. But I’ve lost all faith in this writing team to actually pull together a satisfactory outcome, so my anticipation is seriously muted.

But I shall return. It’s not half as smart as it thinks it is, but Ashes to Ashes is diverting and lively. I just hope they’ve got an ending lined up this time.

A ribbon of dream…

What’s ORSON WELLES doing in this illustration from a 14th century alchemical text?

(He’s wearing one of his false noses, but we still recognise him!)

Quote of the Day: BIG

 

On collecting a young Orson Welles for lunch:

‘He and Virginia, the beautiful young wife he had found in Chicago the previous year, had moved into a curious one-room residence on Riverside Drive. I went there one day to collect Orson for lunch. He said he had been working all night and when I arrived he was still in his bath — a monstrous, medieval iron cistern which, when it was covered at night with a board and mattress, served them as a marriage bed. Orson was lying there, inert and covered with water, through which his huge, dead-white body appeared swollen to gigantic proportions. When he got up, full of apologies, with a great splashing and cascading of waters, I discovered that his bulk owed nothing to refraction — that he was, in reality, just as enormous outside as inside the tub which, after he had risen from it and had started to dry himself, was seen to hold no more than a few inches of liquid lapping about his huge, pale feet.’ ~ John Houseman, Unfinished Business.

Welles at this point had not really started putting on all that weight, so when Houseman is going on about his “enormity”, as a good friend of mine pointed out, it’s not absolutely certain what he means…

Euphoria #41: “I Am The Muffin.”

 

We are gathering together all the little moments of cinema that make you full of happiness the way John Travolta is full of puddings.

Writer, filmmaker and ghost tour guide Kristin Loeer sallies forth with this distinctive take on the subject. As we enter the low 40s, the Euphoria starts to darken, you see. This is noirphoria… 

“I realised that it’s hardly ever happy moments that seem to stick with me. It seems that the scenes that mean the most to me are those that make me recognise something about myself.

“Watching Twin Peaks Fire: Walk with Me was a great experience. The entire film sort of takes me back to my teens and growing up in a small town and facing so many new and scary things, suddenly growing up: sexuality, depression, dreams and fears.

“There are two particular scenes which remind me exactly of the feeling of being between the ages of 13 and 16 again. One is the nightclub scene. I am not saying that is what happened when I went out being about 14, but the general feeling of this scene is exactly the feeling I remember from that time. The raw sexuality, the characters and how they talk and seem to deeply understand each other when it is not making much sense. It is comforting somehow to recognise so much later that the first nights out are not necessarily experienced like the prom in Pretty in Pink, but more like this scene from Fire Walk with Me. It is not exactly a happy realisation or memory but makes you think that some people out there experienced it the same way you did. Which makes me feel better… even though I propably shouldn’t.

“The other is the one in which Laura is in bed at night and Bob comes through the window and crawls onto her bed and they make love and she realises it’s her father. I did not find the scene that disturbing compared to others. It just felt like that is just exactly what sexuality feels like to young girls between 13 and 16. –or is that just me?

“– well, even if it is just me, this scene makes me happy because it is not just me, Laura felt like that too — and no, you don’t have to be abused by your father for it!

“And then of course I remember that significant moment when I zapped through TV many years ago and suddenly saw that moment from Blue Velvet where Isabella Rossellini asks Kyle McLachlan to hit her. It was part of a very short trailer for the film which was going to be on that night. It made me feel very strange and I knew I had to watch this, what ever it was.

“It was one of those first moments I remember where I really thought to myself “Ohh, something is VERY WRONG with you.”

“But that’s all a bit… well, dodgy?” 

We don’t judge, here at Cinema Euphoria. 

(I repeat: Kris is a ghost tour guide. She leads people into Edinburgh’s most haunted catacombs and tells them stories. Come to Edinburgh and she’ll scare the crap out of you for money.)

Interestingly enough, the extract already on Youtube comes as part of a series of “Worst Movie Scenes,” which shows once again that it takes diff’rent stroke / all kinds, etc. But the reasoning behind the scene’s classification as a “worst” seems highly dubious to me, suggesting that maybe it DOESN’T take all kinds, just a magical combination of weirdballs and dumb-asses.

Even interestinger, the very reasons given by the YouTube people for worst-tagging this scene are part of the reason Kris likes it: the baffling dialogue. It’s not that it makes sense to her as such, but it makes sense for the dialogue to BE baffling.

As a sign of how under-regarded this movie was when it came out, the British distributor accidentally released a version without any subtitles for the roadhouse scene,  so this scene was even more puzzling than Lynch intended, since it’s very carefully mixed so you can’t hear quite what anybody is saying (which, as Kris observes, makes it the perfect evocation of the clubbing experience).

The little guy who talks backwards was unsubtitled too, which made things pretty tough.

Of all the stuff you guys have chosen for Euphoria, this clip maybe loses most, firstly because it’s too short, so you don’t get the full oppressive effect of Angelo Badalamenti’s music (which eventually fades out with the longest decay EVER) and secondly because there’s no way it’s going to sound like it should sound in a cinema. I mean, I know our little boxes here are far from adequate at the best of time, I just think this time the shortfall is more than usually destructive.

(Incidentally, Badalamenti came to the Edinburgh Film Festival a few years back and turned out to be THE FUNNIEST MAN ALIVE.)

I think this is a fine example of Cinema Euphoria, even if a lot of people might find it strange. Film is a mental connector, a bridge between minds, and sometimes that projector beam shines out just to find a single person, somewhere in the darkness, and make them glow.