It’s another week here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in and sit for a while. Come in and cool off with us. There’s no cover charge. The dress code is casual. We still have a few tables available. The hostess will seat you now. 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 which struggling Cub was most likely to snap out of it. The vote wasn’t even close. Nico Hoerner got 73 percent of the vote. Moisés Ballesteros was way behind in second place with 13 percent.
Here’s the part with the movies and music. You’re free to skip that. Or you’re free to skip the baseball stuff. It’s up to you.
Tonight we have Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers playing the Freddie Hubbard-penned standard “Up Jumped Spring” live in Hollywood in 1962. Joining Blakey on drums and Hubbard on trumpet are Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Curtis Fuller on trombone, Cedar Walton on piano and Jymie Merritt on bass.
I’ve been watching the World Cup this week instead of movies. I really only watched one film this week, so that’s what I’m writing about.
The first two films made by director Alex Cox, Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, established him as one of the up-and-coming potentially great young directors. Both films got very good reviews for their punk sensibilities and the way they focused on interesting characters. Neither film was a big hit, but they were both made on the cheap and both made money after you added in the video rental fees and TV rights. It’s the kind of resumé that would have major studios coming to you with big offers. Cox claims to have been offered the chance to direct Three Amigos around this time.
Instead, Cox decided that he’d rather just make another low-budget punk movie with his friends, Straight to Hell (1987). The result is an unfocused mishmash that takes a few good ideas and goes nowhere with any of them.
Straight to Hell emerged out of a planned concert tour of Nicaragua by Joe Strummer and the Pogues that was cancelled because it was Nicaragua in the 1980s. That’s something that only a guy who made an album called Sandinista! would think was a good idea. So Cox and his friend Dick Rude (who played Duke in Repo Man) wrote a punk spaghetti Western loosely based on the 1967 Italian film Django Kill . . .If You Live, Shoot! They cast Repo Man veteran Sy Richardson as the leader of a gang of hitmen/bank robbers. The gang is rounded out by Rude, a post-Clash Joe Strummer and a pre-Hole Courtney Love, who had previously made her film debut in a small part in Sid and Nancy. Love had auditioned for the role of Nancy Spungen and Cox loved her for the part, but cast Chloe Webb instead after the financial backers insisted on a more experienced actress for the lead. The part of Velma in Straight to Hell! was specifically written for Love.
This gang of four is on the run after a failed hit job. They head out to the Mexican desert (shooting on the same set in Spain that Sergio Leone used) and they rob a bank on the way so they have money. Unfortunately, they put diesel in the gas tank (because they don’t read Spanish) so they bury the money in the desert. They are now stranded in a small town run by the McMahon gang, a group of ruthless outlaws whose madness is fueled by coffee and hot dogs. (Seriously.)
The rest of the film is a lot of shootouts as everyone tries to find out where the gang buried the money, with Velma screeching that they need to leave town before its too late.
None of this is as much fun as it sounds. None of the characters, other than maybe Love’s Velma, are given much personality. Cox (maybe smartly) doesn’t give non-actor Strummer much to do. Mostly he just carries on an affair with Fabienne (Repo Man and Sid and Nancy vet Jennifer Balgobin), who is married to the man who runs the local general store. Rude’s Willy falls in love with Winstanley’s Louise, but she’s only interested in him telling her where they buried the money.
The McMahons are mostly played by The Pogues, although they are supplemented by Repo Man and Sid and Nancy vet Biff Yeager and Sid and Nancy vet Michele Winstanley.
Other celebrity cameos include Elvis Costello, Edward Tudor-Pole and Jim Jarmusch. Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones play a husband and wife team that want to develop the town. Hopper’s character is named I.G. Farben, which is the name of the giant German chemical conglomerate that produced the poison gas used in the Holocaust.
Zander Schloss, who also appeared in Repo Man and was soon to join The Circle Jerks, plays a hot dog salesman. Miguel Sandoval is another Repo Man/Sid and Nancy vet in the film, playing Fabienne’s husband. Sara Sugarman, Fox Harris and Kathy Burke are also Alex Cox veterans who have small parts in Straight to Hell.
There are lots good moments in Straight to Hell. You’ll probably never forget The Pogue’s Cait O’Riordan leading the town in singing “Danny Boy,” for example. But Rude and Cox wrote the script for Straight to Hell in three days and it shows. The dialogue is underwritten and clichéd. It’s supposed to come off as “ironic” clichéd, but it doesn’t. There are simply too many characters and none of their motivations are clearly developed beyond “Let’s get the money.” Even O’Riordan singing “Danny Boy” is more about let’s just have a musical number than any sort of inherent plot reason. The film gives you no reason to care if any of the characters live or die, which cuts into the impact when most of them die.
Straight to Hell didn’t derail Alex Cox’s career. Even though it was a major flop, it was cheap and independent financed. No one lost their jobs over it. It was his next film, Walker, that killed his career as it was a much bigger budget film and financed by Universal Pictures. The shame is that unlike Straight to Hell, Walker is actually a good film, if a little “out there.” But that’s a story for another time.
Straight to Hell has become a bit of a cult film because of all the great musicians who make an appearance in it and it got a restored version a few years ago. Here’s the trailer for that restored version.
Welcome back to all of you who skip the music and movies. Thanks for stopping by for those of you who skip the baseball stuff.
Quick announcement. SB Nation is making it as difficult as possible for me to include polls in my articles and have ended support for the program we had been using. Why they’re doing it, I won’t speculate. So for now, the polls will appear in “The Feed” unless we can find a workaround. I hope they appear here too.
By the way, I hate this and they are probably doing this just to torture me. OK. I will speculate on why they are doing this.
Ken Rosenthal wrote an article last week arguing that the Cubs should explore trading outfielder Seiya Suzuki. (The Athletic sub. req.) On Friday, Dayn Perry wrote an article about outfielders that the Phillies could target on the trade market and listed Suzuki among them.
So should the Cubs trade Suzuki? To be clear, as Rosenthal points out, Suzuki has a no-trade clause. But Rosenthal points out that since Suzuki is going into free agency this winter, it might be in his best interests to waive it because then he couldn’t get a qualifying offer that would depress his market. (Rosenthal also points out that even if qualifying offers go away in the next collective bargaining agreement, it’s extremely unlikely that they would go away for this upcoming season, since they would be extended before the current CBA expires.)
I’m not sure if Rosenthal and Perry are advocating the Cubs trading Suzuki because they think they’ll fall out of the playoff hunt or not. Despite the Cubs poor May and June, they’re still just one game out of a Wild Card spot as of this afternoon. Presumably, if the Cubs are still fighting for a playoff spot in July, they would need Suzuki’s bat in right field.
Eh, maybe not. As Brett Taylor points out over at Bleacher Nation, the Cubs might be able to trade Suzuki for a starting pitcher and fill in his role in right with some sort of combination of Michael Conforto, Matt Shaw and a prospect. Taylor thinks coming up with such a deal is highly unlikely and probably unwise, but he sees the potential logic.
The Cubs haven’t shown much interest in signing Suzuki to a long-term extension. For one, they have 19-year-old Josiah Hartshorn tearing up the minor leagues and his best position is probably right field. There’s also Ethan Conrad, who has yet to make his pro debut but whom the Cubs are still high on and whom could probably also play right field. Neither of them will be ready this year and probably not to start next year, but the Cubs might naturally be hesitant to tie up right field for 4 or 5 years with Hartshorn and Conrad coming up.
So trading Suzuki now would bring back more than the draft pick that the Cubs were likely to get, assuming that Seiya declines the qualifying offer. Or maybe they could get a starting pitcher who could fill in now and Conforto and Shaw could fill in and keep the Cubs in the postseason chase.
So would you trade Suzuki before the trade deadline?
Thanks for stopping by tonight. We’ve enjoyed having you. Don’t be a stranger. Get home safely. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow for more BCB After Dark.
