Cubs BCB After Dark: How is Craig Counsell doing?

Here’s the part where we listen to music and talk movies. You can skip ahead if you want.

I feel like I play too many of these Emmet Cohen videos, but in my defense, he’s one of the top jazz pianists at the moment, he releases new stuff on a regular schedule, he brings in a lot of other top jazz talent to play with him and most of them are pretty darn great.

So here is Cohen playing “On the Street Where you Live” by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe from My Fair Lady. Joining Cohen is vocalist Stella Cole, Philip Norris on bass and Hank Allen-Barfield on drums.

This is from 2025.

The only movie I’ve seen over the past week is Filipino director Lav Diaz’s historical epic Magellan (2025), starring Gael García Bernal as the titular explorer. I’m unfamiliar with the previous works of Diaz and I found this film a bit tough to get through, although I don’t regret having watched it because there is some good stuff in there.

Diaz is one of the forefront directors in the field of “slow cinema” and it might have helped me to have known that going in. From the reviews, I’ve discovered that at two hours and 45 minutes, Magellan is perhaps the most accessible of Diaz’s movies. Most of his earlier films go four or five hours. One of his movies is over ten hours long. So while I found Magellan to be slow, it’s apparently a sprint compared to his other films.

I also came into Magellan knowing just the bare-bones of the historical event for which the title character is known for. He led the first circumnavigation of the globe, although he didn’t make it all the way back to Spain because he was killed in the Philippines. I knew only one of the five ships and a handful of the men made it all the way back.

I mention this because Diaz doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining things in this film. Nor is there a lot of connective tissue from one scene to the next. Not that I recommend being on your phone while watching a movie, but I found Magellan much easier to follow along after I decided to open up the Wikipedia summary of the Magellan Expedition to follow along with. The good news here is that the film appears to be fairly historically accurate.

That’s not to say that choices weren’t made. Even at two hours and 45 minutes, there was a lot of stuff about Magellan that I was interested in and Diaz wasn’t. But he’s understandably concerned about two things—what motivates Magellan and his relationship to Diaz’s native Philippines. The six-month voyage across the Pacific is reduced to about five minutes. The mutinies all get scenes, but they just appear out of nowhere with no build up. Until we get to the Philippines, the scenes lack a narrative cohesion. I’m guessing that’s intentional.

You would think a Filipino director would be unsympathetic to Magellan, but Diaz tries to be fair to the man while still portraying him as kind of a monster. García Bernal’s Magellan is a deeply-religious man who sees the mission of colonization as one of bringing about the second coming of Christ. He seeks forgiveness from the Church for the terrible crimes that he commits. He gives a Filipino child dying of scurvy some quince jelly, which cures him. He longs for the touch of his wife back in Seville, who visits him often in a dream.

But Magellan also has the brutality of a fanatic, striking out at all of his enemies, real or perceived. He executes several of his own men during the voyage. He rampages through a village because of their refusal to give up the idols of their old gods after Magellan baptized them. His downfall comes over his decision to go to war against a tribe that refuses to convert. Diaz also reveals the real hero of his story at the end, Magellan’s translator/slave, Enrique of Malacca (Amado Arjay Babon).

García Bernal’s Ferdinand Magellan is probably the best reason to watch Magellan. He’s certainly a man of contradictions, full of both small acts of goodness and tremendous atrocities, and García Bernal makes us believe that they could all come from the same person. He also learned to speak Portuguese to accurately portray Magellan, who sailed for Spain only after being rejected by the King of his native Portugal. Don’t ask me about his accent, however.

While I’m sure the film was a big-budget film for a Philippine film, Diaz does have to do a lot with less. Things like the death of Magellan, which would have been the climax of any American film, ends up happening offscreen. That’s part of the reason I had trouble following it. A lot gets elided between scenes and you’re just expected to pick it up.

Unsurprisingly for a Filipino director, Diaz treats the island wilderness and its inhabitants tenderly. It’s certainly not a paradise and the islanders fight amongst each other, but they also are real people who have hopes, dreams and weaknesses. There are certainly a few stunning images at sea as well.

Overall, I found Magellan to be a mixed bag. Even though I now know it’s intentional, I found it slow. I needed a reading guide to follow along with it. But it also wa a film with a clear point of view and a couple of great performances by Gael García Bernal and Amado Arjay Babon. I’m not sure I’m going to go on and watch more Lav Diaz films after this one though. I don’t think I could get through a ten-hour movie.

Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.

The Cubs have now won six in a row, 16 of their last 19 and 12 straight at home. The team is clicking on all cylinders at the moment.

The players are clearly the ones most responsible for the winning, but how much credit do you give to the coaching staff?

Three years ago, the Cubs fired manager David Ross, whom we got to see in the pregame rain delay theater if you weren’t at the game, in order to hire Counsell away from the Brewers. The hope was that Counsell, who had been a thorn in the Cubs side with the “Far-North Siders,” would be the difference in getting the Cubs over the hump.

The Brewers promoted Counsell’s bench coach and finished ahead of the Cubs in each of the past two seasons. To add insult to injury, Milwaukee knocked the Cubs out of the playoffs in five games during the Division Series last year.

But this year the Cubs are rolling to a 23-12 start, which is their best start since 2016. The players all praise Counsell for his leadership. Of course, a lot of players on last place teams praise their manager too.

So grade Counsell’s two-plus years as the Cubs manager. And in the comments, tell us how many wins do you think Counsell is worth. No one knows how much impact a manager can have on a team. Certainly a bad one can mess a team up, but can a good one actually help win a significant number of games? No one knows. So give us your guess. And if you want to give plus and minus grades in the comments, be my guest.

Just get home safely, OK. Thanks for stopping by. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again next time for more BCB After Dark.