Welcome back to BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. We’re starting a new week and we’re glad you decided to stop in. We’re just getting started. There’s no cover charge. We 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.
Last week I asked you what your level of confidence would be if Cade Horton started game one of a playoff series? Most of you wouldn’t hit the panic button at least as 40 percent of you would rank your level of confidence at “3”, meaning the game could go either way. Another 32 percent of you gave your confidence level as a “4,” meaning you’d think the Cubs were more likely than not going to win.
Here’s the part where I talk movies and listen to music. Not in that order, actually. Anyway, you’re free to skip ahead to the Cubs part at the end if you want. You won’t hurt my feelings.
I think it’s been a while since I featured Miles and even longer since I featured anything from Kind of Blue, which I and many others think is the greatest jazz album of all time. So here is Miles Davis and the first great Miles Davis Sextet with “Freddie Freeloader.” Miles is on trumpet, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley plays alto sax, John Coltrane in on tenor sax, Wynton Kelly plays piano, Paul Chambers on double bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums.
I try to stay away from writing about new movies because I think you can find dozens of other people writing about them on the internet and some of those people actually know what they’re talking about. But I make exceptions for foreign and independent films, and director David Cronenberg’s polarizing new film, The Shrouds, counts as that. (Canada’s foreign, right?) The Shrouds is a fascinating mess of a movie that throws a lot of stuff at the wall, but what holds it all together is a mediation about loss and grief.
I’m going to admit that my film knowledge has a major blind spot when it comes to Cronenberg. I don’t think there is a major North American filmmaker that I’m less familiar with than him. For the most of Cronenberg’s over fifty-year career, he’s dealt with horror and body horror in particular, and I’ve made no secret of the fact that I generally struggle with anything other than the most campy horror. So as far as Cronenberg goes, I’ve seen Scanners and . . . well, I’ve seen Scanners. So I may not be the best person to offer my insight into The Shrouds, which may be Cronenberg’s most personal film. (Or it may not. What do I know? I’ve seen Scanners.) On the other hand, if you’re also coming into the film unencumbered by what Cronenberg has done before, then maybe I am the right person to write about The Shrouds.
Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, a wealthy entrepreneur who has been a widower for four years and is still grieving his late wife, Becca. (Diane Kruger). To deal with his wife’s death and to remain close to her, she’s buried in a high-tech “shroud” that allows him to watch her decay in the ground through an app on his phone. He owns the cemetery where she’s buried along with several other rich people whose families want that similar experience. You wonder just what type of family would want such a burial arrangement, but as Karsh tells a blind date (Jennifer Dale) in the opening scene, “How dark do you want to go?”
Becca’s body is thankfully mostly just bone by now as he checks in on her. But Karsh notices some odd abnormalities on her bones that he hadn’t seen before. He tries checking in with the oncologist who treated her, but he’s mysteriously disappeared.
Karsh’s only two friends seem to be Becca’s (apparently) twin sister Terry (also played by Kruger) and her ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), who designed a virtual assistant Hunny (again voiced by Kruger) that this high-tech mortician uses to plan his life. Terry is dog-grooming conspiracy theorist, to the point where she gets sexually excited by talking about conspiracies. She’s also convinced her sister was murdered—or at least illegally experimented on before her death. Maury is tech nerd who is still obsessed with Terry to the point of creepiness.
After an act of vandalism at the cemetery, The Shrouds goes from being a morbid techno sci-fi piece into being the conspiracy thriller of Terry’s dreams. Who vandalized the graves and why? Can Maury be trusted? Can Hunny? Karsh is also introduced to Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a dying Hungarian billionaire who wants to be buried in one of Karsh’s cemeteries but is concerned about security. That sends Karsh down a rabbit hole where he realizes he can’t guarantee the absolute security of his system, leading to even more paranoia.
Not content to go through sci-fi and conspiracy thriller territory, Cronenberg returns to familiar “body horror” territory as Becca returns to him with her naked body dismembered by her cancer. These scenes tread the line between flashback and hallucination, but they’re clearly designed to show how Karsh is dealing with grief.
So Cronenberg is juggling three films: a sci-fi tech parable with Frankenstein undertones, a conspiracy thriller straight from the seventies and Cronenberg body horror movie. There’s also a bit of dark and absurdist humor, like when “Hunny” turns herself into a Koala bear for no particular reason. This is where people who hate The Shrouds get angry: the film ultimately doesn’t care about any of it. The film is about grief and the rest is just window dressing. I admit this dropping of all the balls is frustrating and I still don’t know whether to be frustrated and angry or, like Cronenberg, just not care. But I keep thinking about it, so I guess that’s a positive sign.
The Shrouds was written after Cronenberg’s wife of 38 years passed away from cancer in 2017, and you can see he throws everything he has into the character of Karsh. He even cast Cassel, who looks exactly like a slightly-younger and more-stylish version of Cronenberg himself. When Karsh says he wanted nothing more than to get in the grave with Becca, you know that Cronenberg is actually talking about himself and his late wife.
The Shrouds was originally conceived as a television series for Netflix, who cancelled the project after seeing the script for the first two episodes. It may be that all those dropped balls are just leftovers from the TV series. David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive had a similar origin story and a similar issue with dropped threads. No one cares in Mulholland Drive because it’s such a fantastic film otherwise. (Also, no one expects a David Lynch film to make sense.) The Shrouds isn’t that good. Is it good enough? I think so, but your milage may vary.
So in the end, The Shrouds is a lot of interesting ideas and only a few of them go anywhere. But it looks great, is well-acted and kept me thinking about it long after it was over. Is that enough? It was for me, but it’s a close call.
Here’s the trailer for The Shrouds.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
Miguel Amaya’s minor league rehab is over as he’s spent the maximum 20 days on it. So unless the Cubs find something physically wrong with him and restart his time on the injured list, he’s going to be activated on Tuesday and added to the major league roster. Amaya is out of options, so he can’t be sent back down to Iowa.
I count only 39 players on the Cubs 40-man roster, so Amaya could be activated without designating someone for assignment. But there also isn’t a position player with options that could be sent down to Iowa to make room for Amaya on the 26-man roster, so someone is going to have to be DFA’d. Michael Busch, Pete Crow-Armstrong and Matt Shaw all still have options, but get serious. None of those three are going down to Iowa. Everyone else is going to have to get a DFA to make room for Amaya.
The obvious choice is to designate Reese McGuire for assignment. McGuire was added to the roster when Amaya went down and he’s done a solid job being a backup catcher. His on-base percentage is a miserable .250, but the six home runs he’s contributed means he has a very good slugging percentage of .459 and an OPS+ of 101. Fangraphs, at least, loves McGuire’s work behind the plate and, combined with his offense, give him an overall WAR of 0.8, which is pretty good for just 27 games. (Baseball Reference is not quite as enthusiastic about the defense and have him with a WAR of 0.3. Still not bad though.)
So would you DFA Reese McGuire? Or maybe you think the Cubs should carry three catchers and release Jon Berti or Justin Turner? Teams rarely carry three catchers these days unless one of the catchers can play another position, and really none of these three can. So were the team to go with three catchers, that would mean that they’d have to DH a lot to get at-bats, and that means fewer at bats for Seiya Suzuki.
The problem with designating McGuire for assignment is that if another catcher gets hurt again, McGuire won’t be available to call back up to the majors. I guess it’s possible that no one claims McGuire on waivers and he accepts an assignment to Iowa, but I wouldn’t count on it.
On the other hand, the Cubs do have Moisés Ballesteros in the minors and he’s a catcher, even if the Cubs are reluctant to let him play there in the majors at the moment. They also have Carlos Pérez in Iowa, who is having a terrific year at the plate, albeit in the International League. So it doesn’t really count.
Still, a lot of you have been calling for the release of Jon Berti and/or Justin Turner. So if you think McGuire would be more useful on the bench than those two, maybe you want to go in that direction.
We may know the answer to what the Cubs are going to do by the time you read this, but I’m not asking you what the Cubs will do. I want to know what you would do.
So who would you give the boot to to activate Amaya?
I’m not giving you the option of designating Amaya for assignment. That’s just dumb.
Thanks for stopping by tonight. I hope we brightened up your off-day. Get home safely. Tell your friends about us. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow night for more BCB After Dark.