Cubs BCB After Dark: Is the bullpen in good hands?

Welcome back to BCB After Dark: the grooviest gathering of night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. It’s good to see you back. We hope you had a wonderful holiday break. Please come on in out of the cold. We can check your coat for you. Don’t lose that ticket. There are still 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 week I asked you how big a factor do you think that rookie Moisés Ballesteros will be in 2026. Forty-three percent of you feel that Mo Baller will play between 100 and 130 games for the Cubs next year. Another 32 percent said between 70 and 100 games was more likely.

Here’s the part with the music and the movies. We’ve got our final matchup of the first round of the BCB Winter Science Fiction Classic tonight. But you’re free to skip ahead if you want. You won’t hurt my feelings.

Tonight we feature saxophonist Stanley Turrentine performing one of his signature tunes, “Sugar,” in 1998. I’m sorry I don’t have the names of the other musicians on this performance.

Last week you voted in the BCB Winter Science Fiction Classic and you went with the Terry Gilliam dystopian classic Brazil (1985) over the cyberpunk anime classic Ghost in the Shell (1995).

There’s just one more first round matchup in the tournament and I have to admit that I had a bit of trepidation going into tonight’s matchup. I put both of these films in the tournament despite not having seen either one in over 25 years. In fact, I think I hadn’t seen Gattaca since I saw it in theaters in 1997. So I was pretty worried how well these two films would hold up on a re-watch. Luckily, neither one has aged poorly. In fact, both of them seem to be a bit ahead of their time.

I will admit that I had trouble writing anything about The Matrix that you probably didn’t already know.

1. The Matrix. (1999) Directed by The Wachowskis. Starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne and Carrie-Anne Moss. 

In this tournament of science fiction films of the twentieth century, I could easily argue that The Matrix is the first film of the 21st century. It’s certainly one of the most influential. While The Matrix draws heavily on the virtual reality craze (in film and television) of the nineties, the film also integrates Japanese anime (in particular last week’s Ghost in the Shell), Hong Kong action films and the burgeoning hacker and cyberpunk literary genre. Throw a bit of Alice in Wonderland in there as well. The film has become a cultural touchstone. It popularized the term “red pilled” and for a while, it seemed like every action film had to have at least one slow-motion scene. The influence the film has had on the tech world is immense and it’s not hard to find people who insist that the world we currently inhabit is just a variant of “The Matrix.” When something goes wrong nowadays, someone will often attribute it to “a glitch in the matrix.”

The Matrix is also a prime example of film as spectacle, emphasizing concept, plot, action and movement over character and dialogue. The characters are intentionally archetypes with “handles” rather than names: “Neo”, “Morpheus”, “Trinity”, “The Oracle”, etc. It was certainly a conscious thematic choice to have the characters be so flat, which adds to the whole unreality of the world. I suppose you don’t cast Keanu Reeves as the lead in a film if you’re looking for a wide emotional and dramatic range. But Reeves is very good at whatever you want to call what Keanu Reeves does and his Neo has an everyman quality to him even if he is supposed to be “The One.” 

Having said that, there’s a surprising amount of dialogue in the first half of the film as The Matrix engages in a lot of exposition to explain the entire concept of the film. Maybe “monologuing” is a more apt term. But the Wachowskis never lose sight that this is an action film and smartly use action scenes during the exposition, such as the “dojo scene” between Fishburne’s Morpheus and Reeves’ Neo. Once the film gets past that, the action takes off and never really stops. 

The most striking part of The Matrix is the incredible visual imagination that the Wachowskis bring to the screen. The action scenes take a lot of what was being done in Hong Kong cinema at the time and filter it through a Japanese anime filter, but live-action instead of animated. But it’s not just the action scenes that stand out. The Matrix looked like nothing before it and unfortunately looked like a lot of films that came after it, but that’s only because other films copied from it. The heroes look incredibly cool (especially Moss’ Trinity, who created a whole new look for female action heroes on the screen) and the look of the villains (particularly Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith) has been repurposed from the heroes in Men in Black. The different worlds are color coded—the cityscapes of 1999 are tinted gray and the world behind The Matrix is in cathode-ray green.

Re-watching The Matrix 25 years later, the film really hasn’t changed much. It’s a high-concept action movie that still looks great. It’s characters and dialogue are still flat, although I suppose that’s how a world that is nothing but artificial intelligence would be. It’s cultural influence continues to grow, for better or worse. 

Here’s the trailer for The Matrix.

8. Gattaca. (1997) Directed by Andrew Niccol. Starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Jude Law.

Gattaca is the kind of science fiction film that I wish they’d make more of. It’s a smart and thought-provoking film that relies more on characters, relationships and ideas than special effects and action sequences. So of course it was a bit of a flop at the box office despite getting generally very strong reviews from the critics. 

The title “Gattaca” is a word made out of the first letters for the four nucleobases in DNA and that should give you a clue as to where this film is going. The film is set in the “not-too-distant future” where everything in life is determined by your genetic makeup. A DNA test at birth can tell pretty much everything there is to tell about the life of that newborn. People with strong genetics become the elites of society, whereas those with genetic imperfections become a permanent underclass.

In order to give their children the best chance at life, most parents give birth through IVF after their embryos are genetically-modified to remove all undesirable traits and genetic abnormalities and enhance desirable traits. However, some parents still do things the old-fashioned way, which is how Vincent (Hawke) was born. And as nature will do, Vincent is born with a propensity for heart disease that will likely kill him young. He’s also short, has myopia, left-handedness and a bunch of other undesirable genetic traits by the standards of the film.

Vincent dreams of a life in space exploration, which is a dream denied to anyone with his inferior genetic profile. But Vincent isn’t the kind of person who takes “no” for an answer, so he arranges to swap identities with Jerome (Law), a embittered former Olympic swimmer who was paralyzed after getting hit by a car. Despite being confined to a wheelchair, Jerome’s genes are perfect.

So in much the same way that a doping athlete might try to pass a drug test with someone else’s blood and urine, Vincent uses urine bags and skin patches with blood in them to pass himself off as Jerome. It’s much more complicated than that because the testing happens everyday and everyone’s DNA profile is in the database, but it’s the same concept. Vincent/Jerome’s application to work for the Gattaca Corporation and their space agency is accepted immediately solely on the basis of Jerome’s genetic profile. Previously, Vincent’s genetic profile only qualified to work there as a janitor. 

However, the sudden murder of Jerome/Vincent’s department head has the police investigating everyone in the building. Despite his best efforts, the cops come across one of Vincent’s eyelashes with his real DNA on it. So Vincent immediately becomes the top suspect in the case, even though the detectives don’t know that Jerome is actually Vincent. 

Gattaca revolves around a lot of questions about eugenics, genetic modification and class structure. For this reason, the movie is often taught in medical ethics classes. There’s also the theme of whether we are what our genes make us or whether we can be more. In that way, there’s a fate-versus-free will theme going on as well.

But what really makes Gattaca shine are the characters and the performances. This was Jude Law’s first American studio film and he steals the show as the cynical, angry and embittered Jerome, who goes by Eugene after the switch. This is someone who had the whole world handed to him because of his genetic makeup, but is miserable anyways. Much of Eugene’s motivation (besides money) for helping Vincent is to tell the world to go ‘eff itself. Despite Eugene’s negative outlook on life, he develops a real friendship with Vincent/Jerome and his desire to help his friend becomes his only real motivation in the end.

That relationship between Vincent and Jerome is a real highlight of the film. Hawke is also quite good as the social striver Vincent, who is constantly trying to make himself stand out as Jerome and hide his Vincent self, even though it’s the Vincent part of him that strives for greatness. Uma Thurman plays Irene, a love-interest who works at Gattaca with a good enough genetic profile to work there as an office functionary but not good enough to go into space like she and Vincent dream of. She’s accepted her fate, but Jerome/Vincent inspires her not to. (Of course, Hawke and Thurman would get married after meeting in this film and give birth to Maya Hawke about a year later.) The two cops, played by Alan Arkin and Loren Dean, are police archetypes with a couple twists that I don’t care to spoil. But it does make them more interesting than they seem at first.

I ding Gattaca a little for its use of a voice-over narration early in the picture, but luckily that goes away about a quarter of the way through the film. In any event, it’s not a big deal.

Gattaca got one Academy Award nomination for Art Design, and the interiors of the Gattaca Corporation, filmed at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Marin County Civic Center, are striking. There’s also the touch that everyone drives classic cars from the 1960s that have been obviously retrofitted with electric engines. That’s more of a nod to director Niccol’s love of classic cars than anything, but it is a cool effect. In any case, all of the interiors (and cars) look fantastic. 

With the cast, the emphasis on character and the way it eschews special effects, Gattaca very much has the feel of a ‘90s indie movie, even though it was released through Columbia Pictures. And I mean that in the best way those films could say something important and bring us great characters, not in the way those films could sometime become too pretentious or too twee. It was unfairly overlooked in its day, but it should be up there with the best science fiction of the decade. It has many fans (and a few detractors) among scientists, and in 2011, a poll of NASA scientists named it the best science fiction film ever. That’s high praise from those who live these questions every day. 

Here’s the trailer for Gattaca.

So now it’s time to vote.

You have until Wednesday to vote.

Coming up on Wednesday, we’re going on to the second round and back to the classic ear. The Japanese classic Godzilla (Gojira) will take on the German silent classic Metropolis.

Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.

As we all wait around for the Cubs to do something major, which may or may not happen, there’s no doubt that team president Jed Hoyer has re-tooled the bullpen as he likes to do every year, it seems. While he did re-sign Caleb Thielbar, Hoyer let every other reliever on a one-year deal walk and replaced them with free agent signings. The Cubs even gave Phil Maton a two-year deal.

Al wrote a piece today on the current state of the Cubs bullpen. If we assume everyone makes it healthy to Opening Day (and we probably shouldn’t assume that), then Daniel Palencia returns as the closer. It’s a sign of faith that the Cubs have in him that they believe this young arm can be a top closer. He certainly has the stuff for it.

I would guess that Maton is pencilled in as the set-up man, although if Hunter Harvey can prove himself healthy, he could get set-up opportunities as well. Hoby Milner and Thielbar are the left-handers. and the rest will fill in as necessary. Al also has the list of several relievers who are ready to step in when there’s an injury. There will also be players signed to minor-league deals with invites to Spring Training, although currently Collin Snider is the only one to fit in that category. But you shouldn’t count those players out, as that’s how the Cubs got Brad Keller last year.

So how are we feeling about the Cubs bullpen right now? Did Hoyer make a mistake by letting everyone but Thielbar walk? Or did he do a great job at replacing their production with players who are just as good or better?

What’s your current level of confidence for the Cubs bullpen in 2026?

Thanks for stopping by tonight. It’s good to get back in the swing of things after the holiday. We can get your coat for you. Please get home safely. Tell your friends about us. Please recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again next week for more BCB After Dark.