Welcome back to BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in. We’re so glad you decided to join us. There’s no cover charge. We still have a few tables available. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last night I asked you about the possibility of an in-season tournament for MLB. You reacted pretty negatively to that idea with 92 percent of you thinking it was a bad idea. Not much room to fudge that.
Here’s the part where we listen to music and talk movies. You’re free to skip that if you want. You won’t hurt my feelings.
Tonight we’ve got a piece from saxophonist Joshua Redman with vocalist Gabrielle Cavassa. I know I’ve played something before from those two that got a good reaction, so we’ll see how this one goes over.
Joining Redman and Cavassa are Paul Cornish on piano, Philip Norris on bass and Nazir Ebo on drums.
This is “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” This was recorded just a few weeks ago.
You voted in the BCB Winter Science Fiction Classic and Terminator 2: Judgment Day said “Hasta la vista, baby” to Back to the Future and advanced to the final four.
So now we have our final four films Godzilla (Gojira) won the “classic” bracket. 2001: A Space Odyssey won the “New Hollywood” bracket. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan won the “Star Wars” bracket and Terminator 2 won the “Modern” bracket.
So tonight we have Godzilla going up against 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have to say, the record of things going into battle against Godzilla is not very good, but maybe Stanley Kubrick hid an oxygen destroyer somewhere on the Discovery One.
2001: A Space Odyssey.(1968) Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Starring Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood.
I’ll just reprint what I wrote about 2001: A Space Odyssey in my initial essay.
It’s a goal in my life to one day see 2001: A Space Odyssey in a theater. They usually re-release it for like a one- or two-day engagement every five years, but I never seem to catch it. Maybe I’ll get another chance in 2028.
Like Planet of the Apes, I’m going to assume that most of you who are following along with this have seen 2001, or are at least familiar with it. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL” and the response “I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” are still famous today as warnings about the dangers of computers and artificial intelligence. Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra is now synonymous with overly dramatic scenes. Director Hal Ashby used it semi-sarcastically as Chance the Gardner (Peter Sellers) walked the streets of Washington for the first time in Being There. No one missed the reference then and no one misses it today.
So what can you say about 2001: A Space Odyssey? It’s hard to imagine what kind of impact the special effects had in 1968. Compare the look of this film to any other science fiction film made before Star Wars. It looks real and it looks fantastic. Kubrick even pulls off a lot of zero gravity effects that even directors today are loathe to attempt because of the difficulty and cost. They are so realistic that people came up with insane conspiracy theories that Kubrick faked the moon landing a year later. (And yes, that’s insane.)
Admittedly, if you aren’t willing to suspend your disbelief at all you can tell some shots that are miniatures superimposed over a starry background, but it certainly looks better than anything before it and if we’re being honest, better than most of what came after it. Kubrick won his only Oscar for supervising the special effects of 2001.
There is probably no film that captures the sheer majesty and just sheer awe of space better than 2001: A Space Odyssey. The people—the actors— and their concerns seem small. Insignificant, even. Everything, including the plot, is slow, deliberate and extremely large. The people are dwarfed by their surroundings. As Roger Ebert asked, would the film be any different as a silent picture (with a soundtrack, of course)? Certainly not much. The final movements of the film are without dialogue anyway.
Like the classical music that Kubrick uses in the soundtrack, 2001: A Space Odyssey has movements like a symphony. There’s the famous prologue, set in prehistoric times, where early hominids, the ancestors of humanity, first encountered the monolith on earth. Of course, the monolith inspires these hominids to create the first weapons and uses them in an opera of violence.
The first act then takes the action out into space and a trip to the moon, where yet another monolith has been discovered. Much of this movement is world-building, showing us what life in the year 2001 was like. The second act is the one that most people remember and is the most conventional part of the film. This is where astronauts David Bowman (Dullea) and Frank Poole (Lockwood) are forced into battle with the HAL supercomputer that has gone rogue while on a mission to Jupiter.
The third and final movement is a trippy, psychedelic denouement that takes Dave into a world beyond his imagination, and one presumes, ours. This is the most controversial part of the film, where people expect an answer to the mystery that they’ve been waiting for throughout the film. Instead, Kubrick gives an answer that just raises more questions.
Where heads butt over 2001: A Space Odyssey is over the content of the film itself. It’s certainly slow and deliberate, and some find it boringly so. (More find it awe-inspiring, however.) Many, including Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, had a “what the heck was that about?” reaction to the ending. Others would say that’s the point. We are too small to understand the majesty of space.
The paradox of 2001: A Space Odyssey is that the criticisms one can level at its are also the things that others like best about it. There’s really no character development, it’s slow, the plot doesn’t resolve so much as it just ends—all of these are strengths in the eyes of others.
Above all, 2001: A Space Odyssey made science fiction the stuff of “serious” movies. This isn’t an elevated kids movie. This is a serious film about space for adults. That was rare in 1968 and it’s still uncommon today.
Obviously, it is still considered a masterpiece today. In the most recent (2022) BFI Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey was ranked as the sixth-best film ever made. High praise indeed.
I will add that I’ve since discovered that one of Tarkovsky’s complaints about 2001: A Space Odyssey was that there was too much “world building.” He wasn’t impressed with the scenes of weightlessness and interplanetary phone calls that he thought added nothing to to the plot.
Here’s the original 1968 trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Here’s Siskel and Ebert discussing the film in 1988.
Godzilla (1954). Directed by Ishirō Honda. Starring Akira Takarada, Momoko Kōchi, Akihiko Hirata and Takashi Shimura.
Here’s what I wrote about Godzilla in my initial essay.
All good science fiction represents the anxieties of the age that created it and no people were more terrified of the dawning of the atomic age than the Japanese. The arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union meant both sides were producing bigger and bigger weapons that were capable of unleashing Armageddon. Godzilla is just those weapons come to life.
A month before filming of Godzilla was to start, the US tested their first thermonuclear device on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The military told everyone to stay away from the Marshall Islands at the time, but they didn’t say why. One fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon no. 5) violated the quarantine and was caught in the blast. This launched a huge panic in Japan when the boat returned to Japan and it gave Godzilla its launching point for the unleashing of the beast, although the US isn’t mentioned here or anywhere else in the film. Rather than blame the United States for unleashing the prehistoric monster on Japan, Godzilla takes a more universal opinion that these weapons are bad no matter who uses them for whatever reason.
Once Godzilla is unleashed by the test of the H-Bomb, he immediately heads toward Japan to wreak havoc. (There are some stops along the way to build up the tension.) Dr. Yamane (Shimura) is a famous paleontologist who wants to study the dinosaur come to life, not only for pure scientific reasons but also because Godzilla’s immunity to radioactivity could be a clue for saving all of humanity in the future.
Yamane’s daughter Emiko (Kōchi) is betrothed to the brilliant Dr. Serazawa (Hirata), but is actually in love with Hideto Ogata (Takarada), a dashing ship captain. This love triangle proves to be a crucial part of the film, as Emiko is torn between her love for Ogata and her loyalty to and respect for Serazawa.
Serazawa is the Robert Oppenheimer of the movie as he’s invented something called the “Oxygen Destroyer,” a nonsensical macguffin that can used as a weapon to destroy Godzilla. But Serazawa isn’t convinced that giving the world the knowledge of the Oxygen Destroyer isn’t actually worse than Godzilla. He only changes his mind after Godzilla’s destruction of Tokyo and an appeal from Ogata, as well as a well-timed children’s choir. Even so, he’s convinced knowledge of the Oxygen Destroyer will lead to an arms race that will eventually destroy the world. This is where the somewhat lazy “Godzilla is America” analysis breaks down, because if Serazawa is Oppenheimer, then Godzilla becomes Nazi Germany/Imperial Japan. The film certainly doesn’t let the United States off the hook, but its concerns for world peace cast a much wider net than just Harry Truman, Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller.
But enough of picking up on the World War II references, arms race allegory and the anxieties of the nuclear age. The star of this picture is the guy in the rubber suit, Godzilla. I don’t care that you can tell that he’s stomping on miniatures, the scenes of Godzilla on the rampage are sheer cinematic genius. They are easily better than anything Hollywood was making in 1954 in special effects in science fiction/horror films. And while Godzilla is not defanged here like he was in many of the later Toho Studios films that veered into camp, it’s almost as easy to identify with him rather than with the Japanese people. After all, he was minding his own business, sleeping at the bottom of the ocean for 200 million years when these naked apes decided to wake him up with a thermonuclear bomb. You’d be pretty cranky too! (Plus, a lot of Japanese audiences cheered when Godzilla destroyed the Japanese parliament building. People have the same opinion of politicians throughout the world!)
You can laugh at a man in a rubber suit walking around a miniature set smashing stuff, but you shouldn’t. For Japanese audiences, almost all of whom had survived a horrible air war that included two atomic bombings and the firebombing of Tokyo, those scenes were horrifying. Anything more realistic would have been triggering and honestly, for the technology of the time, the special effects were plenty realistic.
You will sometimes see Godzilla, the original Japanese version of the film, called Gojira. Those are just two different ways of transliterating the Japanese title. Neither is wrong, but neither is right either. Because “Godzilla” sounds better to Anglophone ears and is more well-known, I call it that while acknowledging the other transliteration. And let’s face it, “-zilla” has become a universal suffix for anything to denote something of massive size, both in the US, Japan and elsewhere.
Finally, these comments are about the Japanese original film and not the Americanization of the movie in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, starring Raymond Burr. The original is clearly the better picture, but the US version has its charms and can be a lot of fun. I listened to a commentary track on it by a Godzilla scholar (yes, there are Godzilla scholars) and he argues that Raymond Burr providing play-by-play of Godzilla’s rampage through Tokyo actually improves the terrifying nature of the destruction. That scholar, David Kalat, also pointed out how remarkable it was that in 1956, just 11 years after the end of the war, American producers released a movie where the Japanese, and the Japanese army in particular, were not only sympathetic but the good guys. He also revealed that the voice actor who dubbed both Serazawa and Ogata was the great James Hong, so we actually still have one living actor from the first Godzilla film, in a sense.
Anyway, while I’d love to discuss Godzilla: King of the Monsters with you in the comments, the film we’re voting on is the Japanese original.
I do notice that in the 2016 Japanese film Shin Godzilla, they called the monster “Gojira” while acknowledging the English-language name “Godzilla” as well.
Here’s the original trailer for Gojira. It’s in Japanese and there are no subtitles, but I think you’ll get the point.
Here’s a short film about Haruo Nakajima, the man inside the Godzilla suit in the film. This one is in English and subtitled where it isn’t.
So now it’s time to vote.
You have until Monday to vote. Up next, Star Trek II will take on Terminator 2 in the battle of the sequels for the other spot in our final.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
Now that the Cubs roster for 2026 is mostly set, it’s time to start thinking about 2027 and beyond. And no one is a bigger debate than Nico Hoerner, who is eligible for free agency after this upcoming season.
Sahadev Sharma wrote earlier this week that approaching Hoerner about an extension before the season starts. (The Athletic sub. req.) Al wrote an article about extending Hoerner earlier this offseason.
It’s hard to know what a good contract offer for Hoerner would be. The closest recent comparison that I can find is Ketel Marte’s seven-year, $116.5 million deal (with $46.5 million deferred) that he signed just before Opening Day last year.
But there are some problems with that comparison. First, it was tearing up three years that Marte still had to go on his deal, so it was really a four-year deal that covered his age 34 to 37 seasons. Hoerner is looking at going on the free agent market this upcoming winter at age 30.
On the other hand, Marte is probably a better player than Hoerner. Not by a ton, but he had hit 36 home runs in the season before he signed this extension with Arizona. Hoerner has 36 home runs in his entire career. Marte also has a higher career OBP than Hoerner. Hoerner is the better defensive second baseman, of course, but Marte is also a good defensive second baseman.
The other issue for the Cubs is that they have his replacement ready to go in Matt Shaw. But do the Cubs want to risk handing the keys to second base over to Shaw? Shaw could be a great player, or he could bust. We know what Hoerner is.
So here’s my offer to Nico Hoerner. Four years, $84 million. That’s a big increase over the $12 million he’ll going to earn in 2026. It’s only four years, but I don’t think Hoerner is the type of player that any other team would give a seven-year deal to. On the other hand, the free agent market next winter is expected to be weak on position players.
There is also the uncertainty of the collective bargaining talks next winter. Might the threat of a possible salary cap mean the Cubs might shy away from giving Hoerner that kind of money? Or maybe the Cubs could turn some of that salary into a “signing bonus” which would get paid out no matter whether there was a lockout or not?
Do you think Hoerner would take that general deal? Four years, $84 million? That’s more money per year than Marte would make. Or maybe you think that’s too much and that Hoerner will settle for less?
If you have a proposal for a Hoerner extension, please share it in the comments.
Thanks for stopping by. We’ve enjoyed having you all week. Please get home safely. Stay warm. Tell your friends about us. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again next week for more BCB After Dark.