Cubs BCB After Dark: Grade the 2025 Cubs

It’s the first week of the offseason here at BCB After Dark: the grooviest get-together for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in and sit with us for a while. There’s no

cover charge. The dress code is casual. We still have a couple of 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.

The Mariners went up 2 games to none in the American League Championship Series with a 10-3 rout of the Blue Jays. Blake Snell threw a dominating start for the Dodgers in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, but the Dodgers weak bullpen almost blew it in the ninth. But “almost blow it” and “blown it” are not the same things and the Dodgers beat the Brewers 2-1.

Last week, the Cubs were still in the National League Division Series and I asked who you thought should start Game 4. Matthew Boyd started the game on four days rest and 41 percent of you said that is what you would have done as well. Another 35 percent of you would have started Aaron Civale and gone with a bullpen game after that.

Here’s the part where I play jazz and we talk movies. You’re free to skip that if you want. You probably won’t hurt my feelings.

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Tonight we have a performance from guitarist Julian Lage at the Blue Note Tokyo club this past August. Joining Lage is drummer Dave King and bassist Jorge Roeder.

This is “Speak to Me.” It’s a bit mellow to help you wind down for the night.

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I’ve been working on the upcoming BCB Winter Science Fiction Classic that we’re going to start very shortly. Maybe a week from today. This will be the biggest tournament we’ve have yet, featuring some of the 32 best science fiction movies from the 20th Century.

I intentionally wrote “some of the best” for a couple of reasons. The first is that when I make up these lists, I don’t just go by my own tastes. My own tastes certainly plays a role, but I also use several online rankings as a guide. If a film that I don’t like much shows up in these lists, I will probably add it on the assumption that a lot of you might like it and I might be an idiot. And vice-versa. If there’s a film that I love that isn’t in the rankings, then maybe it’s not as good as I think it is.

It’s an impossible task to decide what is the “best” science fiction movie of the 20th Century and once I admitted that, things became a lot easier. We’re not trying to crown the “best” or “greatest” science fiction film over a 100-year span. We’re trying to decide which film is going to win our offseason tournament. Sure, there’s some overlap there, but our main purpose is to have some fun and learn about a lot of movies.

So when deciding what films make the tournament, I had to decide what films would be the most “fun” to have in the tournament. And for a film to be fun, you have to be able to see it or have already seen it. Originally I had listed director Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film Strange Days as a film that should be in the “modern” bracket. It shows up very highly in several rankings of science fiction films.

But there was a problem. The first is that I’ve never seen it. If you know what my life was like in 1995, that wouldn’t be a surprise and in any case, the film was considered a box office flop at the time. But I was very much looking forward to watching it, so I added it into my preliminary list. I also thought it important to include a science fiction film from a major director like Bigelow.

The problem is that Strange Days is currently unavailable for streaming in the United States, at least in any service I can find. You can’t even rent it. The only way you can currently legally watch it is to get your hands on the physical DVD or Blu-Ray. So I’m going to remove it from the tournament. I’m upset about this because this means the only film with a woman as director is The Matrix, but we only had one woman director in our noir tournament and zero in the Westerns.

Of course, Strange Days will probably show up on HBO Max in December now.

I will mention that if you want to watch the films in the tournament and you don’t have/want the streaming service that they’re on—or you don’t want to play to rent them—be sure to check out your local library or the Kanopy streaming service that comes with your library card. Libraries often have a lot of old DVDs available for borrowing and since the most recent film in our tournament is 26 years old, they may have many of the films in the tournament available for free.

So here are the four brackets that I have at the moment:

“Modern” (1984 to 1999)

1. The Matrix (1999)
2. Brazil (1985)
3. Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)
4. 12 Monkeys (1995)
5. Back to the Future (1985)
6. Repo Man (1984)
7. Ghost in the Shell (1995)
8. Gattaca (1997)

Many of you expressed a preference to include Back the the Future, so I obliged. It’s a good movie. Not my favorite, but it’s good and very influential in popular culture.

Ghost in the Shell made it as the anime entry over Akira for the same reason that Strange Days didn’t make the tournament: accessibility. While Akira can be rented, Ghost in the Shell is available on several streaming services, including some that are free with ads. Akira is on the Crunchyroll streaming service and while my daughter has been asking for us to subscribe to that, I’m going to keep her disappointed.

Gattaca is a personal favorite of mine, but it’s on shaky ground here. Films that could still replace it are Dark City (1998), Galaxy Quest (1999)—although Back to the Future seems to be filling the “comedy” role here, Contact (1997) and Brother from Another Planet (1984). I haven’t seen that last once since a VHS rental sometime in the mid-80s. Actually, come to think of it, it would have been a Betamax rental.

The “Star Wars Mania” bracket (1977 to 1983) is at the moment:

1. Blade Runner (1982)
2. Star Wars (1977)
3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
4. Alien (1979)
5. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
6. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
7. The Thing (1982)
8. Stalker (1979)

I haven’t seen Stalker, but it’s ranked very highly in several lists and it’s easily available for streaming. I’m looking forward to watching it. I think we can argue about the order of the other seven films, but I think those seven belong in some order. I am upset that Escape from New York (1981) didn’t make it.

“New Hollywood” bracket (1962 to 1976)

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
2. Planet of the Apes (1968)
3. La Jetée (1962)
4. Solaris (1972)
5. Alphaville (1965)
6. Fantastic Planet (1973)
7. Seconds (1966)
8. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

It’s funny that I call this the “New Hollywood” bracket when only three of the eight films were made by Hollywood. Three films are French, one is English and one is Soviet.

I’m not sold on The Man Who Fell to Earth. I’m willing to listen to arguments for other candidates like Logan’s Run, Rollerball, THX 1138 and The Andromeda Strain. Many of you expressed that you didn’t think A Clockwork Orange was really science fiction and I was a bit fuzzy on that point too. So that’s why it’s not here. Some mentioned the same for Rollerball. I’ve seen Logan’s Run a couple of times and I think it’s silly. I haven’t seen THX 1138, nor have I seen The Andromeda Strain. Some of you put in a good word for The Andromeda Strain. Others thought it was boring.

The biggest thing going for The Man Who Fell to Earth over The Andromeda Strain and THX 1138 (other than I’ve already seen The Man Who Fell to Earth) is that the first film is available for free on Kanopy and the Roku Channel (with ads) and the other two have to be rented.

I just watched Dark Star (1974) and it’s very different. But I think the film school-budget special effects would cause most of you to laugh at it—and not at the parts that were meant to be funny.

“Classic” Bracket (1961 and earlier)

1. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
2. Metropolis (1927)
3. Godzilla (1954)
4. Forbidden Planet (1956)
5. A Trip to the Moon (1902)
6. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
7. The Time Machine (1961)
8. ????

I’m still trying to decide on the eighth film in this bracket. I originally had Things to Come (1936) in and some of you mentioned that you thought it was dull. I think the film is gorgeous and it fills a void between the silent era and the 1950s. It’s also, I must admit, a bit dull. H.G. Wells got to write the screenplay himself and he turned it into a political tract outlining his futurist philosophy. Not really something you want to follow in a movie.

So I’m looking at other films. The Incredible Shrinking Man, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, This Island Earth, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Destination: Moon, The War of the Worlds and The Blob. I could also do The Thing from Another World. I’ve only seen the last two of those, although I’m halfway through The Incredible Shrinking Man right now.

So I’m open to any of those films or any others that you might suggest.

Please note that the Godzilla in our tournament is the much-superior Japanese-language original and not the English-language version that is now officially titled Godzilla, King of the Monsters. That version edits out a bunch of stuff that makes it clear that Godzilla is the atomic bomb that was dropped on Japan by the US and edits in footage of Raymond Burr staring at the Japanese actors like Jimmy Stewart stared at him in Rear Window. Except even creepier.

So if you have some thoughts about these brackets, now is your last chance to offer your thoughts.

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Welcome back to those of you who skip the music and movies.

The Cubs’ 2025 season is over and so tonight, I’m asking you to hand out a grade. On the postive side, they won 92 regular season games, which is more than I think most of us predicted. But most of us predicted that 92 wins would be good enough to win the NL Central, when it didn’t end up being even close to doing that.

The Cubs also won their first playoff series since 2017, but they failed to advance to the NLCS when they lost Game 5 of the Division Series against the Brewers.

Certainly if you’re looking at positive individual performances, the emergence of Michael Busch as one of the top first basemen in the league has to be considered one positive. Cade Horton coming up from the minors in May and having a second-half that may carry him to the Rookie of the Year award is another huge positive. Putting together a solid bullpen with castoffs like Brad Keller and Drew Pomeranz was something few of us foresaw.

Negatives include the injury-marred second half of Kyle Tucker. That Justin Steele missed pretty much the entire season. Matt Shaw failed to hit much as a rookie.

So what overall grade do you give the Cubs in 2025?

Thank you for stopping by tonight. Let’s make this a regular thing in the offseason. Please get home safely. Don’t forget anything you may have checked. Clean up your table. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow night for more BCB After Dark.