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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:

Retrospective: Twilight (and baseball)

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As someone with my finger on the pulse, I naturally watched Twilight for the first time in 2025. It’s OK — trashy pulp romance. No worse than anything else Hollywood was pumping out in the Aughts, or even the Forties. Chicks in 2008 needed a fantasy where their dirtbag boyfriend was transgressive and actually sex. There’s nothing wrong with vampires for the Jonas Brothers generation — at least Edward’s shiny due to vampirism and not because he’s never met a conditioner he liked. That Twilight hatedom was mostly misogynistic backlash to a pop culture phenomenon about a woman who wants something dangerous is hardly a novel insight — nor, probably is the fact that Edward is probably no worse a boyfriend than half of Twilight‘s critics. In 2025, it’s hard to get mad about Twilight. I can’t fathom watching the sequels — two hours of Twilight is plenty. But I can’t say I minded watching it.

Now let’s tackle the real evil of Twilight: the fact that the Cullens are resolutely, horrendously bad at baseball. Let’s leave aside the Cullens’ profound failure to grasp the importance of position players, or even what position players do. We can ignore the fact that the offense and defense are played by the same vampires almost simultaneously. Hell, I’ll even set aside my theory that the Cullens have infiltrated the Seattle Mariners and are the only reason they’ve never appeared in a World Series.

No. The abomination here is that the Cullens think they’re hot shit for playing baseball in a physical space without clearly delineated boundaries. It’s not fucking impressive for Superman to catch a high fly ball. Edward Cullen cutting off a more-or-less homer is not an act of skill. There are no rules in vampire baseball. It’s a travesty of American’s finest invention, the greatest game ever invented. “Oh, I can homer in a space without boundaries!” Get fucked. Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have redeemed themselves with Love Lies Bleeding and The Lighthouse. The rest of the cast and crew need to tour the U.S. to visit every Minor League Baseball clubhouse and apologize at length. We should have known something was wrong with American men when their objection to Twilight was the girliness of it and not the awful baseball. We know American patriarchy is about misogyny and not real strength or achievement, but the Twilight hatedom, with its nauseating silence about the fatal flaws of vampire baseball, proves it.…

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Review: The War of the Rohirrim

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Roughly half of The War of the Rohirrim‘s best decisions surface in its first scene. The opening gorgeously pans from a map of Middle-earth to its 3D details to a photorealistic shot of the Misty Mountains before being disrupted by a majestic eastle. The appearance of Héra establishes Shieldmaiden of Rohan as a tradition rather than a one-off title, permitting Éowyn (whose reprisal by Mirando Otto is immensely welcome) to belong to a larger history. Éowyn’s voiceover narration establishing that no songs have been written about Héra both builds a tragedy into her story and provides a hefty critique of Tolkien, who only identifies the character as “Helm’s daughter” in Appendix A.

The War of the Rohirrim establishes itself as a minor tale in the Legendarium, a trend Tolkien pioneered long before every attenuated nerd franchise latched onto it. And The War of the Rohirrim somewhat effectively utilizes the ambiguities of the three-page story from The Lord of the Rings by focusing on an unnamed character who’s tragically permitted to fall out of history. The Lord of the Rings, with Tolkien’s use of deliberate gaps and ambiguity in the historical record, is suited to the Rogue One approach. With Rohan, a crucial but less chartered territory of Middle-earth, that approach is a solidly logical idea.

Sadly, probably less than half of The War of the Rohirrim serves that end half as well as it deserves. The characters, while well-portrayed by their voice actors, are reducible to a handful of traits that rarely break out of two-dimensionality. Héra is Éowyn minus the everything, Helm’s mournful relationship with patrilineality is woefully underdeveloped, and Wulf is little more than a reactive revenge monster. At two hours and 14 minutes, The War of the Rohirrim has plenty of time to take its characters to interesting places. Instead we really needed to faff about with a Watcher in the Water eating a mûmak in Fangorn.

There are solid moments of pathos — a couple of character deaths bring some genuinely fantastic imagery. And a second act subplot featuring Helm leads the movie on a fun (if sadly aborted) detour into the numinous. But on the whole, this feels more like an elevated animated Superman movie than a worthy entry in the Legendarium. The hobbits’ description of Helm’s Deep’s founding in The Red Book of Westmarch probably packed more of a punch.

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Review: The Substance

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As Demi Moore awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, she found herself transformed on her bathroom floor into Margaret Qualley.

The Substance touches on a frequently quoted bit of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing about how men look at women while women watch themselves being looked at. In the first act of The Substance, we accompany (Demi Moore in perhaps her most meta role) through her decaying world. Elisabeth’s world is one where her body is commodified, where she is forced to look at herself as a spectacle everywhere she goes. Like all spectacles, she wears down; she’s treated as disposable, ephemeral, like a piece of chicken rotting in her apartment.

When Elisabeth’s double Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges, we first see her from her own perspective: we see her through her eyes, as the object she was created to be. Sue and Elisabeth’s connection is symbiotic-turned-parasitic-turned-symbiotic-again. Elisabeth’s curse is to see herself as the world sees her: something to be used, enjoyed, and disposed of. It’s body horror, but equally, it’s economic horror, depicting a Hollywood where women are a prized commodity — a world that enlightened, post-#MeToo Hollywood pretends not to be anymore.

Imagine Cinderella meets The Metamorphosis crossed with Sunset Boulevard via Videodrome mixed with Twin Peaks: The Return, and you’d have something almost but not entirely unlike The Substance. It’s bizarre, disgusting, and one of the only intelligent statements about Hollywood this side of the turn of the century. Watching this movie slowly turn into a grosser Carrie is delicious. I giggled at some of the nastiest bits — always a sign that a movie is really effectively horrific. What a beautiful year for horror.…

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Review: Conclave

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Carlo Maria Viganò will never recover from being portrayed as a guy who vapes in the Vatican.

In the wake of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young/New Pope, there’s been ample room for more political dramas about the Holy See. Conclave takes the route of the paranoid thriller, treating St. Peter’s Basilica as the Washington of All the President’s Men or the London of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (and indeed, TTSS co-writer Peter Straughan scripted this). Conclave is low on original insights into the Catholic Church, but when the results are this much fun, that’s an easy shortcoming to forgive.

Conclave makes for a fun two hours of intrigue and deliciously Catholic doubt, rife with allusions to the Vatican Leaks, John Paul II and Benedict XVI’s neglect of clerical abuse victims, and the fascism of Piuses XI and XII. My friend Shea Vassar has described it as Mean Girls in the Vatican, and if that appeals to you, this is probably your movie. Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Lucian Msamati, and Isabella Rossellini make the already solid script absolutely sing. Fiennes’ character Lawrence articulates the role doubt has in faith, both explaining an important part of belief and comforting himself for his uncertainty about the Papacy. Like most good paranoid thrillers, Conclave is a story about political power where the greatest institution is rudderless, struggling under the weight of an empty throne, a sede vacante. In a post-Benedict XVI world, it’s not exactly a new insight, but it’s visually poignant and well-visualized by director Edward Berger.

The ending left me slightly cold — “what if we just got a nice Pope?” is a weak response to the ongoing plutocracy and colonialism of the Catholic Church. But seeing a movie about the Vatican take on the damage caused by Humanae Vitae and traditionalist Catholicism was healing for me, and it seemed to be fun for everyone else. If Conclave is what we get instead of The Young Pope Season 3, stories about the Vatican are in good shape.…

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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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