"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do, I stare out the window and wait for spring." - Rogers Hornsby

:: Friday, October 15, 2004 ::

Tomorrow...

... would have been the Cubs' first home game in the NLCS, had we made it.

Here's the National Weather Service forecast for tomorrow:

Saturday: Mostly cloudy, with a high around 49. Windy, with a west wind between 25 and 30 mph.

Saturday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 34. Breezy, with a west wind between 15 and 25 mph.

:: posted by Al at 8:00 PM [+] ::
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Movie Review: "Friday Night Lights"

You may have noticed that this blog has transformed from a nearly total Cubs blog into a movie review site in the last week.

This isn't intentional, of course -- I'd much rather be writing about the first two games of the Cubs/Cardinals NLCS, but that would be in an alternate 2004 universe, not this one, and frankly, there hasn't been much Cubs news worth talking about, and it's way too soon to do any speculating about what they might do for 2005, except for the recent coaching staff shuffle, so with the temperatures rapidly dropping through the 40's, leaves turning yellow and red and orange with equal rapidity here in the city, it seemed appropriate to see this film.

If you don't already know, this movie is based on a well-known book by sportswriter H. B. Bissinger, about real events that took place in Odessa, Texas, in the late 1980's, regarding the Permian High School football team, a team that, if you believe the book and also the way it is realistically portrayed in the film, is nearly a professional team to the people in Odessa, those who follow it (at one point you see "boosters" almost barge into the coach's office with unsolicited advice on how to run the team), and the pressures it puts on 17-year-old kids who want nothing more than to impress their girlfriends (or, the reverse, with girls chasing after football players), and get the heck out of small-town America.

There are two focuses (foci?) here -- the coach, well-portrayed by Billy Bob Thornton, and the star running back, "Boobie" Miles, who seems well on his way to a stellar college football career (we see dozens of college recruiters in one scene), until an untimely injury. The coach is devoted to his players and to the program, but you see clearly the effects it has on his family life -- he almost seems like an itinerant worker at one point.

There are other stories, about the quarterback whose mother drives him harder than he wants to be driven, and the other running back whose father had won a state championship for the same high school more than 20 years earlier, and who drives him so hard that the two have a love-hate relationship...

and what makes this film so effective is that these are all real people, with real stories, and I have no doubts that this sort of thing still goes on in many high schools across the country, where they are far from large cities with professional teams, and so they adopt their local teams as the bigger-than-life people they want to root for, and in this SportsCenter era, that may be even larger pressure than it was in the era to which the book and movie refer. The movie capsules the 1988 season in particular, and as Cubs fans, you will relate to the way that athletes and fans think that something is theirs, only to have it ripped away from them at the last possible moment...

[sigh]

Sports movies, "Chariots Of Fire" notwithstanding, don't generally get Oscar consideration, and "Friday Night Lights" probably won't, although I'd like to see that. Thornton, however, ought to be a dark horse choice for Best Actor. He's been nominated for that twice ("Sling Blade", "A Simple Plan"), and he dominates this movie without being dominating, if that makes any sense.

Well worth your time, riveting and engaging. And not for kids, incidentally -- it's rated PG13, but there's quite a bit of language and sexual situations that are simply not suitable for young kids.

AYRating: *** 1/2

:: posted by Al at 4:45 PM [+] ::
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Movie Review: "Shark Tale"

[sigh]

I should be in St. Louis tonight, seeing the Cubs playing the Cardinals in game 1 of the NLCS. Heck, I even had tickets to the game, bought off the Cardinals website for face value.

[sigh]

I would have posted this review earlier, having actually seen this film on Sunday, but with the problems I've been having with Blogger (it took me a full day to post the "update" to the Wendell Kim post that I actually wrote on Tuesday morning), here it is now.

Sunday, with most of the Division Series decided (I wound up missing the end of a pretty good Houston/Atlanta game), and the Bears not playing on TV (or anywhere else, for that matter), I hied the kids on over to see "Shark Tale", at the Davis Theater on N. Lincoln, and I mention this because it's cheaper to see first-run movies there than at the megaplexes, and the kids, who had never been to a neighborhood theater before, kept asking, as we were walking toward it, "Where's the theater?"

So, this was a new experience, and so was the movie.

This film is the brainchild of the same crew that was responsible for the "Shrek" films, though the animation in "Shark Tale" is much more conventional than the 3-D style used in "Shrek".

And the animation isn't the key here -- this is a star vehicle, which is really a first among the animated feature films of the last few years. It's not just the voices of Will Smith, Robert DeNiro, Renee Zellweger, etc., but positions it as "starring" these people -- in fact, the Smith fish is drawn to look like him, the ridiculous-looking puffer fish (voiced by Martin Scorsese) has goofy-looking eyebrows like Scorsese's... well, you get the idea. Not all the fish are drawn this way -- the shark mob boss voiced by DeNiro doesn't look much like DeNiro -- but this is clearly a way of getting fans of these big stars (and these days, you don't get much bigger than Smith, Zellweger, and Angelina Jolie) to see this film.

The story's a bit darker than happy tales like "Finding Nemo" or "Shrek", and as such I wouldn't recommend it for small children. The "sharks" are based on mob characters such as you might find in the "Godfather" series of films, and Oscar, Smith's character, is a ... well, he really IS a small fish in a big pond, winds up in debt to the sharks, and in a series of goofy coincidences, finds himself dubbed "Shark Slayer".

There are funny moments, and double entendres -- in fact, Rachel kept pointing out that there was a line "for the halibut", intended to, of course, replace "for the hell of it", and my kids are keenly aware of what "bad words" are, but it's not easy to explain wordplay to kids, and as I said, some of this film is a little bit above what you'd want children who might like "Nemo" or "Shrek" or even something like "Antz".

This isn't a great film, but had its moments, and one of the funniest characters is Lenny, son of DeNiro's boss shark, who doesn't want to follow in the family business and has become a vegetarian, and is voiced exceptionally well by Jack Black, who has shown tremendous versatility and talent in the roles he's taken, from "High Fidelity" to "School of Rock" to this one.

I wouldn't rush to the theaters to see this one, but it's worth a rental.

AYRating: ** 1/2

:: posted by Al at 5:25 PM [+] ::
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Ding, Dong!

We got our wish!

Those of us who used to rail at Wavin' Wendell Kim waved goodbye to him today, as he was the only 2004 coach not retained for 2005.

There will be changes in duties for the other coaches. Gary Matthews, so beloved as a Cub player in 1984, but equally rotten as a hitting coach, will switch duties with first-base coach Gene Clines. I don't know how good Clines will be as a batting coach, but he sure can't be any worse than Matthews.

There were rumors that a Dusty Baker favorite, Sonny Jackson, might become third-base coach, a position he had under Baker at San Francisco. But the Cubs website article linked above says he will remain "special assistant" to Baker, so that leaves the 3B coaching position vacant, for now.

This is a good thing, and shows that Jim Hendry is not going to allow Baker an absolute free rein next year. Don't get me wrong -- I'm a Baker fan. But his pet coaches haven't been very good, and this gives Hendry a chance to go out and get someone who's actually good at being a 3B coach, rather than just a manager's pal, as Kim was, and as Gene Glynn was under Don Baylor, and ... well, you get the idea.

No one's going to listen to me, but if I were doing the hiring here, I'd try to pry Rich Donnelly away from the Brewers.

Not only does he have impeccable credentials (23 years as a coach, including working closely with managerial genius Jim Leyland for several years), but he's well known around baseball as having a great sense of humor.

This is something that couldn't hurt in a clubhouse that had its underwear on WAY too tight most of 2004.

Just my $0.02.

UPDATE -- Tuesday's Tribune reports that former Cub Chris Speier is the favorite to be named third base coach.

Speier spent 2004 as bench coach for the Oakland Athletics. Yesterday, the A's announced in a very terse press release that his contract wasn't going to be renewed. Apparently Speier was involved in a lineup snafu (sound familiar?) and also gave bad batter-pitcher matchup information to A's manager Ken Macha.

I'm still pushing for the Cubs to at least interview Rich Donnelly.

(Note, I have had big problems trying to post to my server the last two days -- this update was originally written Tuesday morning. Working on it!)

:: posted by Al at 7:39 PM [+] ::
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A Cautionary Tale

As most people this morning were paying attention to the death of actor Christopher Reeve, too young at 52, nearly a decade after he was paralyzed in a horseback-riding accident, there was another celebrity death that could change the face of baseball.

Former Astros and Padres third baseman Ken Caminiti, who was more than six years younger than I am, died of a heart attack last night in New York, where he was visiting a friend.

Caminiti was among the first major league ballplayers to admit to steroid use during his playing career, and looking at his career stats (and props to baseball-reference.com for already updating his page with the date of death) it's not hard to figure out exactly when he started -- he performed at one level, averaging a dozen or so homers and 75 or so RBI for five seasons, then suddenly in 1995 his offensive output surged, and in 1996 he won the NL MVP award with a forty-homer season, leading the NL in ten different offensive categories.

Maybe hearing about this will get ballplayers who are taking illegal performace enhancers to think twice. Dodgers outfielder Steve Finley perhaps said it best:

Man, that's just a tough one. I played with him for eight years. He was a great player, but he got mixed up in the wrong things -- taking drugs. It's a sad reminder of how bad drugs are and what they can do to your body. It's a loss all of us will feel.

We can only hope. I do not think we've seen nor heard the last of the steroid controversy, and sadly, I don't think this is the last such story we'll hear, just as the story of NFL star Lyle Alzado, whose steroid use caused his death at age 43 from brain cancer in 1992, was only the tip of the iceberg of the then, and we presume, current abuse of such things among pro football players (c'mon, you don't really think 350- or 400- pound linemen occur naturally, do you?).

Alzado, in a Sports Illustrated shortly before his death, gave these words which are, unfortunately, apparently not being heeded by pro athletes:

It wasn't worth it. If you're on steroids or human growth hormone, stop. I should have.

All of it should stop, before more lives are lost.

:: posted by Al at 9:17 AM [+] ::
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Movie Review: "Cellular"

Did you know that there's a point, when you are flying from New York City to Chicago, where you can see both Detroit, and the western curve of Lake Michigan?

That means you can pretty much see the whole state of Michigan, and at sunset time on a Saturday, that's pretty cool.

That's what I saw on my flight back from NYC last night -- actually, Newark Airport, as I couldn't get the flight time I wanted out of LaGuardia, since I had originally booked a midafternoon flight back from my Directors Guild of America Eastern Directors Council meeting, in order to make what I figured would be our first home Cub playoff game, and though the Houston win over Atlanta Saturday was at noon CT, I think that had the Cubs been involved, the TV moguls would have wanted them in prime time...

and as we flew in over Lake Michigan, at sunset, I could see Wrigley Field, dark and silent, rather than brightly lit, as it should have been...

and isn't it annoying, when you fly in from the east, to fly about 30 miles PAST O'Hare to the west, then turn around and land facing eastbound? And then sit for another few minutes about 20 feet short of the gate, because you are early and the plane that was supposed to have vacated your gate is still there?

OK, so that was my afternoon yesterday.

Friday, in New York, it was a gorgeous early-fall day, with sunshine and temperatures in the 70's, so I took a walk through Manhattan, and bought the book "Fever Pitch", by British novelist Nick Hornby, who wrote "About A Boy" and "High Fidelity". "Fever Pitch", though, is no novel -- it's an autobiographical account of his lifelong fanaticism for the British football (read: soccer) team Arsenal... and if you're as obsessed with the Cubs as I am (and if you're reading this, I think you are), you ought to read this book.

I recognize a lot of me in Hornby, as he's almost exactly my age, and ... well, just read it. I found myself a bit jealous, as during his coming of age and young adulthood, his team actually won some championships.

Oh, well. The book is being made into a movie, Americanized to be about a Boston Red Sox fan, and starring Jimmy Fallon of Saturday Night Live fame, and Drew Barrymore, among others. In fact, if you can't wait, it has already been made into a movie in Hornby's native England.

What does all this have to do with "Cellular"?

Well, nothing, actually, except for the fact that when I got tired of walking around midtown Manhattan yesterday, I decided to kill a couple of hours seeing this film.

That's exactly what it did, too -- kill two hours. It's not a bad movie, just not a really good one, either.

The basic premise is: Kim Basinger, playing a mother of a 10-year-old boy, and living in fairly luxurious surroundings (we find out it's Brentwood, a ritzy part of Los Angeles), is kidnapped, for something her husband has.

It is, of course, not what you'd think, but the title of the movie comes from the fact that Basinger (who spends most of the film in tears) manages to wire together a smashed-up phone and gets, through random dialing, a twenty-something slacker on his cellphone.

At the beginning of the movie, this kid is thinking of nothing in life other than impressing the girl who's trying to dump him, but of course, he's going to become the hero.

There's plenty of implausible events, chase scenes that are cool but after you think about them, you ask, "How could they survive THAT?", and plot holes that you could drive the Porsche that gets carjacked not once, but twice, through.

Ah, what the heck. I asked for escapist fare and I got it, and it was worth seeing to see William H. Macy, a terrific actor, appear with an algae mask on his face. No, you'll have to see the movie to find out why. Oh, and it now costs $10.25 to see a movie in midtown Manhattan -- no bargain matinees, either (I saw a 3:50 pm show).

And there it is, a weekend, which would have been better spent at a Cubs/Braves playoff series. And, the Yankees finished off the Twins to set up their second consecutive ALCS with Boston, starting Tuesday.

Let's go Red Sox.

AYRating (for "Cellular"): ** 1/2

:: posted by Al at 5:15 AM [+] ::
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