Eruditorum Press

Devoid of both military and civilian applications.

Christine Kelley

About Christine Kelley

Christine Kelley writes about art and politics. Currently her main project is Nowhere and Back Again, a psychogeography of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Her first project was the now semi-retired blog Dreams of Orgonon, a song-by-song study of Kate Bush. Support Christine on Patreon.

Posts by Christine Kelley:

Freelance Subversion: Time Bandits

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With Life of Brian out of the way, Terry Gilliam had partially unshackled himself from Monty Python. He was unable to bring his masterpiece Brazil to the big screen, but he was free to focus on his own movies. He’ll come back to Python in 1983 for The Meaning of Life, which is the movie most influenced by the Pythons’ solo careers, but from now on, he’ll be an artist in his own right rather than just the Monty Python cartoonist. Gilliam is Python’s Peter Gabriel, the member who goes off and does weird, antagonistic art for an audience who knows his new stuff better than his Python work (granted, he splits Peter Gabriel duties with the equally wayward John Cleese). When he does return to Python, it’s like an old novelist reuniting with his college buddies. He doesn’t have a Spamalot moment, infusing one of his old hits with some new clever, fun bits. From this point on, Terry Gilliam is a forward-looking director.

At least in theory. Gilliam can’t stop himself from co-writing a movie with Michael Palin. And it’s hard to blame him. Aside from being a notoriously lovely chap, Palin is Python’s second best writer. Time Bandits benefits enormously from Palin’s influence. It’s consistent in character, theme, plot, and tone, an enormous leap in quality from Jabberwocky. While Time Bandits explores a lot of the same ideas as Jabberwocky, it feels more like a movie you can show your kids for fun than one you’d show them as punishment. For the first time, Gilliam directs a classic on his own terms, rather than splitting duties with Terry Jones (like in Holy Grail), or feeling like he’s putting a demo reel on the big screen (Jabberwocky).

Time Bandits has an all-timer of a premise (a step up from Jabberwocky, which only narrowly has a premise). Kevin, a young boy in the English suburbs, is whisked away from his miserable life by six dwarfs who are fleeing their boss — who is God  — after stealing a map that allows them to travel time and space. Unlike the Doctor who stole a Tardis and ran away, the dwarfs aren’t interested in seeing the wonders of the universe. They don’t even know the history of the universe they helped create — Napoleon and Agamemnon are unfamiliar names to them. The dwarfs only want to rob the whole universe blind. The cosmos is their Treasure Island — damn the safety of the young boy in their care.

Like its predecessor, Time Bandits scoffs at the idea of heroes. Kevin, ostensibly a fairy tale hero, is more interested in his books and violence than human suffering (as poor Shelley Duvall and Michael Palin find out). The dwarfs are mostly sociopathic upstart criminals. Ian Holm’s Napoleon is too busy giggling at violent puppet shows to accept Castiliogne’s surrender. Robin Hood (who of course is John Cleese) is a phony leading a gang of gratuitously violent Merry Men.…

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Freelance Subversion: Jabberwocky

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jabberwocky (11)

Part 1 of a look at the movies of Terry Gilliam. 

In 1977, the members of Monty Python are in a weird space between Holy Grail and Life of Brian. Michael Palin and Terry Jones have just made their successful first series of Ripping Yarns, while John Cleese is in between series of Fawlty Towers and in the process of divorcing Connie Booth. Eric Idle has done Rutland Weekend Television, is getting ready to do a Rutles movie, and has hosted Saturday Night Live. Meanwhile, Graham Chapman, the Python who notoriously fared worst as a solo act (despite being the group’s best actor), is getting ready to write, produce, and star in a comedy film called The Odd Job which is so obscure that I’d never heard of it until I checked Wikipedia five minutes ago.

Meanwhile, Terry Gilliam attempts to start his solo directing career with Jabberwocky. Unfortunately for him, his first solo movie gets marketed in America as Monty Python’s Jabberwocky. Gene Siskel’s scathing review of Jabberwocky seizes on that aspect of the marketing when he declares the movie “suitable for those who like unfunny comedies.” Certainly if you watch Jabberwocky as a comedy, you’re going to have a miserable time. The jokes only make up about half the movie’s runtime, and many of them jut out awkwardly from the bits where the plot happens. Some of the jokes are very good — the scene where King Bruno promises his daughter the west tower only for the tower to immediately disintegrate is a knee-slapper. The whole ending is a very solid and incredibly bleak joke. But Gilliam didn’t do himself any favors by starting his solo career with another jokey medieval fantasy film featuring Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Neil Innes (nor does he ever seem to learn his lesson). Add some executive incompetence and bad marketing into the mix, and it’s remarkable that Terry Gilliam has directed 11 more movies since Jabberwocky.

But Gilliam has been a terminal contrarian his whole life. He’s not so much box office poison as a commercial suicide bomber. Starting his career with a bleak anti-comedy that makes Holy Grail look like a glamorous vision of the Middle Ages is just what we expect from him. Jabberwocky is an extremely grimy and bloody fairy tale with crepuscular lighting that could well have influenced David Lowery’s The Green Knight. The skeleton of many of Gilliam’s later movies are here. Jabberwocky looks at the same fables that Disney treated as escapist and goes “gee, wouldn’t you hate to live in this kind of story?”

The protagonist, a cooper’s son named Dennis (played by Michael Palin), lives in a time of knights and monsters, but he’s more interested in stocktaking than adventures. He spurns the beautiful Princess who falls in love with him for a fat girl who couldn’t care less if he got eviscerated by a Jabberwocky (spoiler warning: Gilliam’s gender politics will never improve). He becomes the story’s hero purely by accident, and when he gets the fairy tale happy ending, it’s a nightmare for him — the antithesis of the tedious middle-class life he really wants.…

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Review: Joker: Folie à Deux

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The problem here isn’t that Folie à Deux betrays the first Joker. The first movie was clear about Arthur Fleck’s importance being a laughable self-delusion. Most likely a lot of fans of the first movie are uncomfortable with Folie à Deux because it’s not actually very different from Joker. Like Harleen Quinzel tells Arthur Fleck, “let’s give the people what they want.”

But Folie à Deux doesn’t give the people what they want. It doesn’t even give them what they fucking deserve. Hell, it doesn’t even give those of us who were cautiously looking forward to a Joker musical with Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn the pleasures of, well, that. It’s hard to tell if Todd Phillips thought he was giving anything to anybody, except a two-and-a-half-hour handjob to Joaquin Phoenix. And if Phoenix’s idea of a good time is starving himself and showing his protruding ribs on film, well, good luck to him. His narcissistic wet dream bombing is what he deserves after walking out on Todd Haynes and company five days before shooting was supposed to begin.

The nerds ranting about Joker: Folie à Deux are angry for the wrong reasons. They can see this is a bad movie, but they hate it for emphasizing the subtext of the first movie. Joker‘s ultimate flaw was that, despite its 20-odd minutes of excellence, it’s not about much more than the misery of this one guy. It had moments of genius — the talk show scene is an all-timer — but its critique of neoliberalism and the destruction of support systems really boil down to “this guy’s life sucks.” Joker took on the trappings of Taxi Driver, a nightmare about the monsters that the United States creates abroad and unleashes on American streets, and used them to say “man, crazy dudes sure have it hard, don’t they?” while painting mental illness and violence as the children of violent and unstable women.

I don’t hate Joker. It succeeds at being something that I appreciated more five years ago than I do now. And Folie à Deux mostly follows in its footsteps, serving as a functional companion piece to that movie. Arthur Fleck remains a symptom of a sick world. Gotham is still a cracked reflection of Robert Moses’ New York. There are moments of cleverness in the mix. But everything that was ugly about the first movie gets dialed up to 11 here. I walked out of the theater feeling nauseous and angry, like I’d been complicit in something evil. For all of Joker‘s problems, that wasn’t my experience of it.

Unlike its predecessor, Folie à Deux doesn’t make overtures at being about interesting things after its halfway mark. Early on, there are dalliances with Joker being a sick media creation by a diseased news and culture industry. There are a few genuine laughs in here. The Warner Bros-style cartoon that opens the movie is fun. And the first time Arthur Fleck burst into song, I started cackling with delight — an effect I believe was wholly intended by the movie.…

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Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

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Nice to see that Tim Burton still has a good movie in him.

Obviously it’s another legacy sequel, but that’s more of an indictment of the state of big-budget Hollywood movies than of Burton. And if you’re going to do a sequel to a pop classic from the Eighties, you can do worse and more banal than Beetlejuice. A lot of the core players return for this one, and nobody is just repeating their shtick from the Eighties. If you’re going to make a legacy sequel, try to do it like this.

Like every legacy sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about the longevity of its predecessor. Lydia Deetz is a middle-aged celebrity, coasting on the fumes of her traumatic childhood. Her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) hates her for her emotional absence and her ghost bullshit. Delia Deetz is the curator of the worst Brooklyn art show you’ve ever seen. Justin Theroux is Lydia’s awful and exploitative manager, and one of the funniest parts of the movie. And Jeffrey Jones’ character is fucking dead under hilarious circumstances.

Meanwhile in the netherworld, Beetlejuice is working a shitty desk job while trying to outrun his ex-wife Monica Bellucci. His assistant Bob has a shitty little afterlife. And Willem Dafoe is an action movie star spending his afterlife as a ghost police detective.

With that setup, all the movie really has to do is let the characters run wild. And it does just that, allowing these characters to run in and out of each other’s paths. It’s cleaner than it could be, although a lot of subplots end abruptly (not forgotten, just resolved very quickly). The results are hardly radical, but they’re great fun. More of this and less Mary Poppins Returns, please. Michael Keaton, stop motion, grim ghost shenanigans, and goofy lip syncing is all you really need from a night at the movies.…

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Review: Shadow and Flame

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What a weird show.

P&M have finally figured out some of the fundamentals of drama. It would be easy (and somewhat unfair) to say they’re just learning how to do drama by drawing from Tolkien, but “Shadow and Flame” proves that the successes of this season weren’t a fluke. P&M have a creative vision, and it’s one they’ve realized more or less competently this year.

To a degree. Everybody has acknowledged that this show’s pacing is ass. But it becomes most clear in the season finales. I couldn’t tell you, two years on, what the hell happened in the first season of Rings of Power. And this season, while at least structured around three specific, thematically related events — the decline of Eregion, Moria, and Númenor — doesn’t do much better on the pacing front. By the end of this season, Númenor is… closer to becoming Atlantis. So is Moria. Eregion has the decency to actually fall. But the other two stories feel like they’re just waiting for a finale. It’s exhausting. I can’t imagine they’ll do more than another two seasons, but man. There are episodes where seasons happen and seasons where episodes happen.

And those are the three plots that more-or-less unambiguously work. The now-Gandalf/Nori plot doesn’t resolve so much as abruptly end, in a way Chris Chibnall might applaud. Once again, we’re getting a finale is mostly structured around teases of the next season. Ciarán Hinds makes a great Saruman, drawing more from the books’ tantalizing, seductive character than Christopher Lee’s operatic evil (a respectable, even necessary choice). But he’s there to abruptly displace the Stoors in an extremely contrived development — I’d say it’s out of character, but we don’t really have an idea who this version of Saruman is. Now-Gandalf concludes the season as he began it — wandering in the desert and having things explained to him.

That’s a running theme here. Galadriel also has a lot of things explained to her in lieu of doing things. Characters disappear from the story for long periods of time only to return and do… not much. Isildur returns and reunites with That Kid from Season 1 right before getting captured by Númenor’s Madison Cawthorn. And most egregiously, the promise of Adar gets thrown out the window when the Orcs — suddenly and without explanation — murder him (though apparently we can Simon Tolkien for Adar sticking around this long). We had a moment where we could have seen Orcs developing an agenda beyond that of Sauron, and that got chucked out the window.

At the same time, Adar’s murder by his own children is thematically in touch with the rest of the season. Durin watching his father sacrifice himself fighting the Balrog makes for the defining setpiece of the entire show. This season is about something in a way its predecessor wasn’t. And the death of Celebrimbor, at the hands of his tearful foster-son/brother/lover? Sauron, elevates both characters (even if it gives Celebrimbor an obnoxious title drop).…

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Doomed to Die Review

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maybe not. But also, what the fuck?

To Payne & McKay’s credit, they’re finding new ways to fuck this up. Instead of mangling a version of the show that wasn’t working anyway, they’re juxtaposing the best parts of The Rings of Power with… weirdly mean-spirited fridgings? Elrond/Galadriel incest? The A-plots of about five different episodes? There was a good 40% of this episode that worked, and the rest of it felt like a P&M script.

Celebrimbor is the part that works. Annatar keeping Celebrimbor in a time prison, where he forges rings as Eregion burns, is glorious, taking one of Tolkien’s most dramatic stories and injecting it with fresh human emotion. The scene where Sauron tells Celebrimbor about being tortured by Morgoth is the single best bit of writing of this show’s two seasons (Charlie Vickers starts coming to life when he gets to be a sneering villain). And Celebrimbor having to lose a part of his body to save his soul forms a nice parallel with Frodo and Maedhros. That part of the episode is genuinely phenomenal and tragic, everything you’d want from a filmed Silmarillion.

The rest of the episode is… so, what the fuck? We’re dealing with some George R. R. Martin-style plotting, where we’re constantly groping for new bits of plot. Tonally, we’re doing some weird stuff, and putting dramatic emphasis on bizarre things (the horse? the lady elf archer getting shot to death?). Galadriel continues to be The Rings of Power‘s Thirteenth Doctor, getting lectured at while breathlessly intoning words of motivation to men in despair. It’s not that Tolkien was innocent of making women the support systems of men, but like, Éowyn and the Witch-king this ain’t.

There’s not a whole lot to say here. It’s Part 1 of the finale. Part 2 is the episode where we get to have opinions. But in the meantime, we’re stuck waiting around to see just how badly P&M will fuck this up. …

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Where Is He? Review

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Like not-Gandalf in “Where Is He?”, The Rings of Power faces a crossroads. Pre-season finales have a tricky part to play. They need to set the stage for the ending, synopsizing the season to date and making an argument for how it should end. By that standard, “Where Is He?” is a shining success that capitalizes on all the most compelling parts of The Rings of Power‘s second season.

Perversely, this makes me even more concerned about the finale. We haven’t seen a Payne & McKay script since Season 1’s final episode, which was… I think they revealed Galadriel’s squeeze was Sauron? Maybe Celebrimbor forged the Three Rings? They’ve gained some competence since then. Season 2 has proved they know how to staff a writers’ room. The season’s good episodes exist because P&M allowed them to. To deny their role in the better episodes of this season would be as disingenuous as saying that Seinfeld only worked because of Larry David. Do I trust these guys to land a season finale? After last time, basically no, but for the first time, I’m actively hoping — perhaps futilely — they don’t fail instead of surrendering to the seemingly inevitable.

Not that “Where Is He?” is a masterpiece. Galadriel’s role in the episode (and most of the season) is to get lectured at by Adar and other male characters. She gets leered at for the entire episode, making few decisions except spilling her guts to Adar and unwittingly helping him to besiege Eregion. The fascist dweebs whining about diversity should be assuaged by this move, which outdoes Tolkien on the reactionary front.

The series’ usual faults are present. Charlie Vickers remains positively ligneous as Annatar, even as the scripts handle his character pretty well. The not-Gandalf and Harfoot subplots lack any momentum (The Rings of Power‘s pacing has only improved since Season 1 by dint of things actually happening this season). The Stoors evoke (probably on purpose) the quasi-Aboriginal children from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in a racially uncomfortable way. And not-Gandalf getting the Dagobah treatment from Tom Bombadil is a downright grating piece of Hero’s Journey-ism that contributes nothing to the season’s saga of complicity, guilt, and sundered families (I yelled at my TV when I heard Tom Bombadil say “many that live deserve death”).

But once again, these flaws are mostly frustrating because the meat of the episode is so solid. Sanaa Hamri is TROP‘s best director to date, creating drama with her shot choices that aren’t there in the script. An aerial shot of Númenor that directly parallels the island with Minas Tirith is downright jaw-dropping, as is the night-to-day rotating shot of Sauron in Eregion. Hamri even draws out some tension in the not-Gandalf/Bombadil scenes with a slightly unnerving low angle. And the Jaws homage on the shores of Númenor rivals anything Peter Jackson ever shot.

The rest of the episode is fairly excellent. Celebrimbor takes an Othello-like turn as his Iago Annatar coerces him into creating the H-Rings, torn apart by guilt and gaslighting.…

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Halls of Stone Review

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“Here, we bring the sun to us. At last, it is daybreak once more in our mountain!”

In its own way, The Rings of Power perfectly demonstrates Tolkien’s contention that all good things can be used for evil purposes. The show has some strong writers turning in good scripts and great scenes. A handful of actors — particularly Charles Edwards, Owain Arthur, and Lloyd Owen — routinely give strong performances. The second season has even had moments that elevate the source material. On weeks like this, it’s even almost good. But the show’s flaws are so gaping that even the light of Ëarendil can’t lead it out.

Perhaps the show’s biggest onscreen problem — aside from its aesthetic flaws — is Sauron. Charlie Vickers has the range of a two-by-four, walking through each scene with the same vacant facial expression that somebody on the set has mistaken for ambiguity. You could argue that Sauron is pretty much a void himself, but the show wants us to believe that Annatar is a seductive, beautiful force. Vickers would be a problem if he played Isildur or even Arondir. The fact he’s playing the fucking Lord of the Rings is show-breaking.

And that’s a shame, because it means that this week Vickers is ruining one of this show’s two actually good scripts. Vickers isn’t making Annatar the warm, seductive, dangerous figure he’s supposed to be, but the character on the page is an excellent foil for Celebrimbor. Annatar forces Celebrimbor into what amounts to a stupor of guilt, forced to craft the Rings because he’s cut himself off from the outside world. It’s a damn good depiction of gaslighting, not least because somebody on the set was clearly gaslit into believing that Vickers can act.

The whole episode is dramatically united around moments of hope before the Fall, generally with fathers and sons having their relationships torn apart. The scene with Durin’s Door is quite good, making one of the great scenes of The Lord of the Rings even more tragic (a sign of the lost friendship between Dwarves and Elves). It’s good stuff dramatically. Visually, it has all the pitfalls this show tends to suffer from (weak directing, awful lighting), and that certainly prevents this from being a strong episode of TV. But let’s call it the second best episode of this probably doomed season.…

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Review: Eldest

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A week ago, I would have expected much worse from The Rings of Power than “slight structural mess.” I’m shocked the show has graduated to “collection of good scenes with some real gems in the mix.” If last week’s episode was an unexpected step in the right direction, “Eldest” stumbles off the trail a little bit before more or less getting back on track. I’m still not optimistic for the season finale, but seeing The Rings of Power embrace quality even for a minute is pretty unexpected.

After “The Eagle and the Sceptre” spent its runtime exploring how power changes families, “Eldest” goes smaller, focusing on the development of Tolkien’s characters before they became legends. The episode puts its characters in early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, essentially turning them into fantasy protagonists embarking on a quest. The strongest scenes are the ones with The Stranger and Tom Bombadil (and having Rory Kinnear play this role so soon after Men is funny). Letting not-Gandalf be a confused Istar in a post-regenerative haze figure out his purpose works better when Bombadil is leaning over his shoulder, instead of a couple of hobbits constantly asking “who is the Stranger?” Bombadil could easily be fanservice, especially in this show, but here he serves a thematic purpose, as the “Eldest” who shows not-Gandalf the nature of names and substance (“Who are you?” “Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer”). It’s a nice little rebuke to this show’s exhausting tendency towards guessing games about a character’s identity – or at least a redirection. We’re graduating from JJ Abramsesque puzzle boxes to Steven Moffat-ish games.

Sadly, there’s still fanservice. Galadriel and Elrond’s encounter with the Barrow-wights adds fuck all to the episode, doing little other than extending the runtime and homaging one of the least interesting chapters of The Lord of the Rings. The whole sequence fucks the episode’s pacing. While things are finally starting to happen in this show, fewer things are happening this week than last. That would be fine, but four episodes into an eight-episode season, it constitutes a massive pacing problem.

There are other nice bits. Galadriel talking about her experience of Nenya actually lets us understand what the Three Rings do. The encounter with the Stoors is funny, and shows that tyrannical matriarchs are a hereditary problem in their tribe long before Sméagol’s grandmother comes along. And it’s always good to see some Ents. This episode isn’t great, but I’m shocked it doesn’t suck either.…

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Review: The Eagle and the Sceptre

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Shit. I liked it.

That was a nicely done hour of television about how the lure of power thwarts family relationships and uses good intentions for evil ends. It’s the best original work to come out of the Legendarium in 12 years. Did The Rings of Power always have the capacity to do an episode like this? I’m not sure, but a Hannibal writer sure was able to pull this off.

Perhaps the main thing this did right was focusing on the show’s more interesting plot threads. We’re finally back to the Númenóreans, who provide some really strong drama. The scenes with Isildur are genuinely moving, showing him as a guilt-ridden young man desperate to make a mark. It turns him from the corruptible scapegoat of The Fellowship of the Ring‘s prologue into a tragic figure.

Helen Shang makes similar overtures with Celebrimbor and the Durins. They fall prey to Annatar’s machinations because of their desire to make a mark or survive. The Durins want to save Khazad-dûm and preserve their way of life, so they provide Celebrimbor with materials to forge the Seven Dwarf-rings. Celebrimbor is willing to lie to Gil-galad to save his legacy. Characters who come across in appendix form as tools become sympathetic, even noble figures whose attempts to help are doomed by history.

There are lots of neat details too. Adar having an Orc family humanizes the Orcs in a way I would never have imagined last season. The Ents showing up is nice, and the Eagles get established as a crucial symbol for Númenor instead of the deus ex machina they’re (somewhat unfairly) tarnished as. This episodes positions the Rings of Power that characters try to use to redeem themselves. And it screws them all in an act of glorious tragedy. This episode reaches into the Legendarium, seizes on Tolkien’s themes, and finds new things to say about them.

I can’t believe it. Just this once, The Rings of Power has elevated The Lord of the Rings.…

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