Gladiator 2 was just straightforwardly bad? I’m not sure how it has 71% on Rotten Tomatoes?

I just did not like this movie. It was almost, but not quite, fun watching how bad it was and thinking of all the reasons it was bad.

    • What the heck is Paul Mescal’s character’s emotional throughline? It’s totally inconsistent. We know his wife for 90 seconds and then she dies, and that’s supposed to be his big motivation, he’s crushed at losing her—but he gets over wanting to kill Pedro Pascal in retaliation the second Pedro calls him by his original name and he realizes that Pedro isn’t loyal to the emperors (presumably—I don’t even know why he changed his mind so quickly)? Pedro literally called to his men to shoot Paul Mescal’s wife, you don’t get over that in two seconds even if it was a “misunderstanding.” And I get running away to be safe, but Paul Mescal wasn’t just distancing himself from Rome, he was actively leading the fight against them, talks about how Rome is diseased, and then by the end is totally happy to fight for Rome’s “strength and honor”? What? How much did you actually care about your wife, sir?

    • The original Gladiator was actually good, right? This movie has me doubting that. But it was good. It was a movie that acknowledged that, even going back thousands of years, most of the bad things that happen to us have complicated, structural, political reasons behind them, and it was a fantasy of being so special and powerful and skilled that you can fight those structural reasons with your fists and fix things.

    • But by taking place 19 years later and having basically the exact same problem (comically evil emperors acting with impunity and a lack of accountability), this story ruins the original Gladiator by showing that all of Russell Crowe’s efforts didn’t actually fix anything.

    • Joaquin Phoenix’s performance was great because you saw him become/be revealed to be crazy and evil gradually over time. The emperors’ schtick would have been interesting if it was the last 5-10 minutes of the movie, their final depravity, but they started out just SO comically evil.

    • And how did they get into power? For a movie about how power is available in Rome for those willing to fight to get it and keep it, the formally most powerful characters are a pair of dweebs incapable of fighting for anything. Completely unaddressed who they are, how they got into power, why anyone is loyal to them. Are Rome’s institutions somehow strong enough that it’s really hard to marshal anyone to stand up to these dweebs and their supposedly legitimate claim to power, but simultaneously not strong enough to place any institutional checks or guardrails on their out of pocket behavior? That would be a really interesting and timely thing to specifically address in the film, rather than just being like, “Despite Russell Crowe’s heroic efforts, things have gotten bad again in the exact same way they were before and no we’re not going to explain how that happened.”

    • This movie felt ahistorical to me. The characters felt like they shared the values of modern westerners and didn’t have the specific values that Romans would actually have. Paul Mescal talks about the Roman Dream, a thing that I am not confident actually existed or was talked about at the time? Rome in the imperial period was ABOUT POWER. It was about bread and circuses, and spreading glory, and feeding the populace and honoring the gods through conquest and killing as many people and taking as many slaves as you had to in order to do it. At one point Paul Mescal says something about “if a man isn’t free, then what is Rome for?”, a just BAFFLING thing to say about a city where, again, a massive quantity of residents at any given time were slaves.

    • (Minor note on the ahistoricity but, I know it’s an English language film, but can the writing/engravings be in Latin? So jarring to see them be in English, it just looks wrong. I did see some graffiti which said “IRRUMABO EMPERORES”, if I remember correctly, and look, I love a good “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo” Catullus moment but why go Latin for the irrumabo but not follow it with imperatores? Latin may be a dead language but it’s more studied and understood than many living languages, people will notice these things and it will take them/me out of the moment! Also it was far from the worst in terms of Hollywood movies but it did have some set pieces that were already ruins and it’s like—no, the gate to the city would be well maintained, it wouldn’t already be crumbling stones with big gaps.)

    • I didn’t like how this movie presented the violence/fight scenes. First of all, it wanted Paul Mescal to seem a little bit pacifist by being hesitant to fight at first. At one point he calls another gladiator brother while trying to convince him they don’t have to fight to the death for the entertainment of wealthy elites, but he quickly gets over it! Which I do get, he’s fighting for his life, fine, but why include that gesture to pacifism at all? Just to make his later violence a little more sympathetic? It felt like a gesture to the first movie where Russell Crowe didn’t fight at first when taken to the gladiator training place thing and was underestimated for that reason, but this is a different movie! You don’t need to match all the most popular/affecting beats of the first movie one-for-one, in fact, it would be far better if you liberated yourself from the first movie and embraced making something different!

    • The fight scenes were also just baffling to me. I can’t tell if Paul Mescal is actually supposed to be good at fighting. Every time he fights it seems like he’s barely winning, even when he’s fighting against people who, to our knowledge, have far less experience. It just seems like the movie thinks a really close fight is the most visually interesting, so that’s what they gave us every time, but there are interesting ways to choreograph fight scenes that show that someone is an exceptional fighter without it being boring and the fights always being over in two seconds. ALSO, I know this is just a movie thing but holy Jesus the amount of blows that Paul and other characters take that should absolutely floor them and they get back up—his surrogate father gets a compound fracture and with a basic splint and NO ANTIBIOTICS somehow survives the long journey across the Mediterranean to Rome only to be murdered by a baboon? Characters can be a little tougher in movies to heighten the action without going so far as to have Paul Mescal get punched in the face repeatedly with a metal spiked gauntlet and not having any scratches to show for it.

    • Another thing is we never see Paul Mescal training for anything. It’s kind of implied that he must be a good fighter, and a good military leader, and a charismatic person, but except for the last, it’s all kind of told, not shown. Maybe it’s just that I like a good training montage, but it really helps me feel for a character when I see them trying, and Paul just shows up good at everything he needs to be good at. He even gets the loyalty of enough of his fellow gladiators just through laughing along when they make fun at him one time to stage a rebellion against the praetorian guard? At the very least you could give us a scene of him building his connections, earning that loyalty.

    • That kind of ties into the fact that Paul Mescal(‘s character) is actually shown to be bad at everything. He never actually saves anyone he wants to save. His wife, surrogate father, Pedro Pascal (when he apparently immediately decides he doesn’t want him dead because he knows his name), his mom—they all die so quickly without Paul’s attempts to save them even being a factor, really. That could be interesting if it was an emotional focus of the film—”I’m so good at fighting, I’ve been in a hundred deadly situations and I’m still standing here, but it isn’t good for anything because I can never save the people I care about.” That would be an interesting emotional journey for him, but it doesn’t come across that way, it just comes across as “Well, they need to die now for the story, so.” The only thing he can save, in the end, is Rome which, given his backstory of Rome killing his wife, dad, mom, surrogate father, and Pedro Pascal, and proving once before that even when a heroic gladiator ousts the corrupt emperor it can and will go bad again, WHY DOES HE WANT TO SAVE ROME?

    • This is a really minor thing but there’s a lack of precision about what words mean. At one point Paul Mescal says, “I’m not a general, but we’re all soldiers,” to a bunch of gladiators, and that’s just patently untrue? He was shown at the beginning to be commanding the forces at the town he was defending, if he didn’t literally have the title of general he was at least a military leader. And gladiators aren’t soldiers! Gladiators were professional athletes, good at fighting on their own and making a show of it. Roman soldiers were a very different thing, disciplined and making smart use of military engineering and fighting in precise, overwhelming formations. Words mean things! It would be really interesting to actually contrast what it means to be a soldier versus a gladiator, maybe have Paul Mescal be bad at being a gladiator at first, an underdog, not good at fighting one on one or not good at making a show of it and winning the people over to his side and he has to learn, and then at the end once he’s won over his battalion of gladiators everyone’s shocked at how good he is at strategizing and his followers are like, “Oh, I see, you’re more used to operating at this level.” I would find that more interesting, at least! But the movie seems to operate on one continuum which is good-at-fighting to not-good-at-fighting, and there’s one kind of fighting that everyone does, and it’s just boring.

    • I think my problems with this movie may ultimately come down to politics. It’s about a collapsing empire. We know the Roman empire isn’t around anymore, we know they’re ultimately fighting a losing battle, with the perspective of history we can all probably acknowledge that no empire lasts forever. Paul Mescal has seen perfectly how even the heroic efforts of capable people can’t change the empire’s corrupting nature. But it seems like the story wants us to buy into the idea that this time will be different, he’s special and will be able to change things.

    • “Well Emily if you’re so smart, how would you fix the movie?” I’m so glad you asked, the answer is right there, it’s the person I haven’t mentioned yet and who should actually be the main character—Denzel Washington.

    • It BAFFLES ME that Denzel Washington plays a fun, over-the-top camp, former slave of Emperor Marcus Aurelius who fights and connives and schemes until he has all the power of an Emperor and plans to use it to bring the empire to the ground and HE IS NOT THE MAIN CHARACTER??? How is Denzel Washington not the point of view character, the character we’re supposed to be rooting for? WHAT??? How is it specifically stated on screen that yes the “good” “benevolent” Emperor Marcus Aurelius owned slaves and yet the happy ending is Aurelius’ grandson getting power and committing to returning things to how they were in his granddad’s day?

    • You could barely change this movie and have it be great just by making Denzel Washington’s character the main character. He starts from the bottom and works his way up and he does all manner of terrible things to get there, but he isn’t going to do terrible things to stay there. He’s seen what Rome is, and what power is, and how power inevitably corrupts, and he wants it all to come to an end. Denzel Washington uses Paul Mescal and his belief that he can fix Rome once he’s in charge of it as a tool, but the whole time he knows Paul Mescal is just being naive and neither of them could fix it by being in charge, you have to break the cycle.

    • Because Gladiator is a power fantasy about solving big structural problems with your fists and your sword, and the big structural problem here is that Rome is a voracious empire and it constantly needs more land and more food and more conquered peoples to serve in its army and be slaves in its fields and bathhouses and fine homes, and the way you fix that system isn’t by putting a morally good person in charge of it because by definition any person in charge of that system, any person who wants to be in charge of that system, isn’t morally good. Denzel Washington’s character knows that the way you fix that system is by breaking it, even if breaking it breaks you in the process.

    • So it can either end with Denzel Washington dying, as he did in the movie, but with more emphasis on how he believed in his goal and he knows that the world will get there someday, he’s one of a line of people who will try and try and try before finally Rome’s insidious power is broken, and maybe Paul Mescal lives but he understands Denzel Washington’s concerns and having lost everyone he cares about and having his image of Rome forever tainted he’s burdened with doing the one thing he never thought he’d have to do, given how dangerous his life has been, living a long, healthy life using politics and bureaucracy rather than his fists to solve problems and make himself and his family line worthy of the power they have (maybe you even have him acknowledge to Denzel Washington before he dies that he’s right, but you have him say something about, “It’s too soon, Rome is still too much, the sudden instability would be worse than the slow decline.”).

    • Or you have Denzel Washington win and become emperor and march into the Senate and declare slavery is illegal and reparations for all and we’re going to cede back these colonized territories and everything devolves into chaos and he knows that these things can’t happen peacefully within the Imperial system because the Imperial system depends on its slaves and colonies but the point isn’t to actually have them happen, the point is that they should happen so he’s going to try to make them happen and happily watch the empire buckle and fall apart from its fundamental incompatibility with justice. And we end on a shot zooming closer and closer into Denzel’s face as he smiles with satisfaction, as the senators’ debate gets more and more chaotic.

    • Seriously the more I think about it the crazier it is to me that they made a movie about a former slave cleverly amassing power to conquer and eventually topple the state that enslaved him AND YOU MADE HIM THE BAD GUY? YOU MADE DJANGO UNCHAINED SET IN ROME BUT DJANGO’S THE VILLAIN? WHAT??????????

    • I’m a little over villains being queer coded but Denzel Washington is so fun in this movie I’ll give it a pass.

    • I want to acknowledge that I’ve advocated for a vision of this movie with a very specific political point of view and I think that the fact that the movie is a hair away from actually having a coherent message is part of what makes it so infuriatingly, bafflingly terrible, but ultimately even if I supported the “loyalty to institutions over all, even if those institutions support slavery and colonization, what exists and has existed must always exist” point of view that this movie seems to be furthering, it would still be a bad movie because, again, Paul Mescal’s character’s emotional journey makes no sense. Why do you need to give him a dead wife. Just to mirror the first movie? Why would it not be enough to just have him sneak back into Rome as a gladiator and have to try to work his way up until he can get an audience with his mother and plot overthrowing the emperors? Why give him a backstory that, rather than explaining his motivation for the rest of the film, actively doesn’t make sense with what he does at the end of the film?

As many have said, the sharks were cool. And many of the performances were actually great! They were just great in a terribly written film.

Photos from October Korea Trip

It's been a while since I've posted and I'm declaring bankruptcy, I'm just going to upload some pictures and not try to cover everything that's happened since the last time. Korea! I got a disposable camera and only five pictures turned out unusably dark. (I forgot how to use low-tech cameras, if I ever knew.)

Michigan Dinner, Morocco, and Chocolate Workshop

It's been an eventful little while! Since the last time I posted I went to a dinner for Michiganders that our Deputy Chief of Mission hosted. By coincidence we have a lot of people with Michigan connections at the Embassy!

And then I went to Morocco. It was a great trip! It was an organized trip through Intrepid, and I was really impressed--we had a great group.

After our hike in Mount Toubkal National Park, posing in front of the small village in Imlil district where we were staying.

Near the highest pass through the Atlas Mountains (we stopped for pictures right before the highest point because our tour guide advised us that there's no good outlook there).

Sunrise at Ait Benhaddou.

At the rug co-op in Ait Benhaddou--I ended up getting one, and an extra bag to bring it back in!

The Sahara!

The walls at Taroudant.

Various sights in Essouira. There were tons of cats all over Morocco!

Never trust an Australian who claims they don't surf--but it was still fun!

Left: overuse of portrait mode in Essouira. Right: crazy post-surf hair (also still oily from the visit to the hammam the day before) but REALLY digging that veggie pastilla.

The whole group on the last day! Left to right: Emma, Kim, me, Anastasia, Eugene, Youssef, Ali, Claire, Shannon, and Melanie.

And after my return and getting back into the swing of things, the Community Liaison Office at the Embassy arranged a trip to make and taste chocolate in Grand-Bassam. That was a lot of fun--single source chocolate really does taste different!--although it's not quite cacao season right now.

Yamoussoukro, Bouake, and the Botanical Garden

February was fun here in Abidjan! Les Elephants pulled out a spectacular come-from-behind African Cup of Nations victory, and you could feel the joy all throughout the city. I also traveled to Yamoussoukro and Bouake. Yamoussoukro is the political capital of Cote d'Ivoire and Bouake is the second largest city. I'd never visited either before, so it was great to see some more of the country and get out of Abidjan.

One of the guards talked my way onto a private tour because I arrived at an awkward time and there would have been a long wait for a group tour. These guys were very nice about me tagging along!

The stained glass in the Basilica of Yamoussoukro was all imported from France.

The tour guide knew all the best angles for pictures.

At a pottery cooperative outside of Bouake.

The community liaison office at the Embassy also pulled together a trip to the botanical garden, which was a lot of fun!

Praying mantis!

I was particularly interested by the bougainvillea, having just read a book (Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib) that, in one chapter, used bougainvillea as an entree to talk about the naturalist mode of colonialism and travel.

On the work side of things, I switched to a different portfolio that I've never worked on before: American Citizen Services. It's definitely an interesting challenge, and part of why I was excited to be assigned to a smaller consular section where you get to do a little bit of everything.

Bonus: me and Secretary of State Blinken and a handful of our good buddies. (This is from his visit last month, but they just shared the pictures.)

Holiday Travel to the U.S. and Excitement in Abidjan

For my first trip back to the U.S. since getting to Abidjan, I took a nice long holiday vacation, spending time in Michigan, Minnesota, and Colorado. I worked until right before Christmas, departing on December 22 and getting back to the U.S. on December 23. Because I was taking so long off work, I expected my time in the U.S. to feel relaxed--and I certainly did get plenty of time to unwind--but it really was pretty packed!

The day I landed mom, dad, and Mer picked me up at the airport, and then Aunt Ellen almost immediately stopped by the house to spend some time. That evening I attended the church's Lessons and Carols service and read one of the lessons (despite being very tired from having slept on the plane). The next day, Christmas Eve, was the big Brehob extended family Christmas, then on Christmas Day we did the BreKapp family gift exchange. The day after Christmas, as per tradition, we drove to Minnesota, and then on the 27th we did the Kappauf family Christmas. We had a couple of quieter days in Minnesota, then drove back to Michigan where I fretted about packing and got a haircut, and then it was off to Colorado.

The reason I departed for the holidays so late was because my Peace Corps training group decided to have a reunion on MLK day weekend. I thought I could just about make it work to attend the reunion by combining it with my holiday travel, but if I was staying so late after, I didn't want to use a ton of leave before the holidays. When I told my other friends who live in Colorado that I was going to be there, and would they like to get dinner if I got there a day early, they suggested that I come a week early and go snowboarding with them that weekend. That then left me with the week to fill in between the two weekends--I couldn't bring myself to fly back to Michigan for just four days or so!--so I managed to convince my dad to fly out and join me for four days of skiing, for six days in a row, total.

I guess the snow conditions weren't great at Breckenridge, per the Coloradans, but I don't get to go skiing much and hadn't gone for more than a day or two at a time since I was in high school, I'm pretty sure, so it seemed fine to me! Worse was the cold, which even natives agreed was unusually punishing. With my grad school friends I stayed in an AirBNB, the steep and snowy drive up to which made me very glad the car rental place had upsold me to a 4WD Jeep. When I swapped out and joined my dad, he had booked accommodations for us maybe a three minute walk from a ski lift, it was fantastically convenient! Both with my grad school friends and with dad we took it pretty easy with lots of breaks to warm up and not forcing ourselves to shut down the lifts.

Unfortunately, the first day I ran into dad--I thought he was doing a turn but was going to keep going, and only realized he was pulling up for a full stop too late. Even he agreed (maybe just being nice) that it was a pretty light hit, but definitely still bad! There's no excuse. It hurt his arm and although he kept going the remaining three days, it kept hurting and he was worried it might be a hairline fracture. Fortunately, unless he's lying to me to keep me from feeling guilty, it was just a soft tissue injury and is already feeling a lot better. I also fell the first day, no one to blame but myself, and hurt my ribs on the left side, where the hurt after I fell running in April last year--I've since seen the Embassy nurse in Abidjan who said it's almost certainly just a muscle strain, so it's good to know it's nothing serious, but running seems to irritate it so for the last couple of weeks I've been exercising less, and mostly on the stair machine or elliptical when I do. Chronicling the injuries makes it sound like it couldn't have been a very fun trip, but we had a good time! It wasn't too crowded, and we tried a few new things. We also went to Keystone one day, which I'd never been to before.

Me and dad at Breckenridge! The combination of the cold and the dry air wreaked havoc on my skin, it was fully flaking off my skin by the end of the week and I was slathering on petroleum jelly to keep it from cracking painfully. Still worth it!

We drove back to Denver the night before dad's flight, rather than the morning of as we'd originally planned, due to a storm warning. That made it pretty smooth to drop him off at the airport, and I had a nice relaxing day in Denver--I'd originally planned to get a massage, but the appointment got cancelled last minute, so I did a light hike in the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and did some shopping. We can't have lithium ion batteries shipped to post in any of our official shipments, whether by air or cargo ship, we can't have them shipped through diplomatic post or pouch, we can't even bring them in checked luggage, the only way we can get any modern devices to post is in our carry on bags, so I had requested as holiday gifts things that I'd been wanting for a while but couldn't get shipped to post, namely, an insect repellant device from REI to use on my porch, and more controllers for my Nintendo Switch to better enjoy Mario Party. While in the mountains, I'd tried someone's TheraGun and thought it seemed pretty great, and when I considered that I couldn't get one shipped to post and would have to wait months or possibly more than a year if I didn't get one right away, I decided to just stop at a Dick's Sporting Goods and buy one.

Me at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal--it was a nice hike, and practically balmy after being up in the mountains. There are buffalo in the background, trust me.

And then I picked up some Peace Corps buddies from the airport and drove back into the mountains, this time to Granby. It was a really great weekend--we listened to our favorite songs from the Peace Corps and caught up on everyone's life developments and went for walks and to a hot spring. They're not people I talk to on a regular basis anymore, but it's really nice to know that the dynamic does come back when we're able to get together.

Getting back to Abidjan from Granby was quite the adventure. There was a winter storm warning active the entire weekend, so I and a few others with early flights Monday had decided that we were going to drive down early to try to avoid traffic, and I was monitoring it most of Sunday. When we went to the hot springs, there was a sign on the door advising that they expected the pass that we wanted to take would be closed soon due to avalanche risk--no big deal, there were other roads that would take us where we needed to be. We left around 16:40, and at the time, google maps predicted that we'd get in around 19:15. We were looking forward to getting dinner and having a restful evening before turning in early so we could get to the airport early.

Google maps' predicted arrival time kept getting later and later. Occasionally we'd go through an area with no signal, and when the signal was back, the predicted arrival time would have jumped 40 minutes later, or a full hour. Eventually we were on I-70 in a complete standstill. It took us 90 minutes to go one mile. People were getting out of their cars to pee on the side of the road, or just to talk to other people. At that point I'm pretty sure we didn't have cell signal because the network was overwhelmed, it's a pretty major highway so I suspect we usually would have had service there. We had to pull over to the far right to make room for emergency vehicles and tow trucks multiple times. Eventually we got past the stoppage, but we couldn't see anything to explain what had happened--as traffic funneled into one moving lane, there were a bunch of police cars and two semi trucks with no apparent damage. Maybe the more damaged vehicles had already been towed away at that point. Even once we got past that, it was slow going because it was completely dark and snowing pretty heavily. I absolutely did not want to slide off the road or get into an accident, so I was driving pretty far under the speed limit. All told, we got to Denver SEVEN hours after leaving Granby. Everything was closed, even the Taco Bell that google maps claimed would be open and on which we'd pinned all our hopes for some kind of warm meal. We ended up going to a gas station so I could fill up and just bought snacks there--I got Nutter Butters and Fritos as my last meal in the U.S. The attendant asked if we'd been stuck on I-70, so I guess the traffic was bad enough it made the local news, at least the radio. It was a hellacious drive, but I really appreciate the passengers for being so calm and patient. We weren't completely free of anxiety, but I've definitely known people who would have been freaking out a lot worse. We managed to mostly just have nice conversation, interspersed with practical discussions about if we'd even be able to sleep or just have to go straight to the airport, or at what point we should think about rescheduling our flights.

One of our Denver-based Peace Corps hosts let us crash at her place, but we didn't get much sleep, falling asleep after midnight and waking up shortly after 04:00 to get to the airport. I dropped my driving buddies off at the airport, then swung back to the rental car place to drop off the Jeep as soon as they opened. The shuttle back to the airport was so cold that I took off my shoe and started massaging my foot to stay warm--even with all the frigid time on the mountain, it was the coldest I'd been the entire trip! But the whole ordeal paid off, more or less, because everyone who'd gone in my car made our flights. I was nervous for a bit at the airport, the snow was still really coming down and a lot of flights were being cancelled or delayed, but my flight left only slightly late. The others in our group who drove down the morning of got stuck on the mountain because I-70 itself was completely closed. I think they ended up having a decent time, being able to change their flights and having some nice additional bonding time, but I was definitely glad not to have to deal with rescheduling anything so last minute.

I made my connection in Detroit by the skin of my teeth and with a lot of luck, including my luggage for the first time I can remember being some of the first off the plane, and a very nice desk agent letting me skip the line to check in when I told her I was in danger of missing my flight. I was especially nervous because these tickets were booked separately--I'd used my government-funded rest and recuperation ticket to get to Detroit, but had paid for my own ticket to Denver, so they wouldn't automatically rebook me if I missed the Detroit-Paris flight because my flight from Denver was late, even though they were all Delta flights. But I did make it, and from there the rest of the travel went pretty smoothly.

And it was right back to work in Abidjan! I got in at about 20:00 on Tuesday, and was back in the office at 07:30 on Wednesday. I'd been contacted the week before to let me know that the Secretary of State was coming to Abidjan, and to ask if I would be site officer for his meeting with the Minister for Foreign Affairs. His schedule ended up changing and he didn't have a full meeting with the Minister, so I got moved to a smaller role at the airport during his arrival, but it was still quite a welcome back to work! The African Cup of Nations has also been taking place since I got back, and Cote d'Ivoire is still very much in it (with a little rescue from Morocco!) so that's causing lots of excitement.

Similar to the buffalo, you just have to trust me that Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in the distance in this picture.

With everything going on I still feel like I'm getting back in the swing of things after leave. Soon I'll be moving from the immigrant visa portfolio at work to American citizen services, and I have a few small trips coming up, but it shouldn't be anything as eventful as my three week expedition back to the U.S.