Frost/Nixon

Frost/Nixon (***1/2)

"So what in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal."

"Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."

That exchange was one of the most significant moments from the real life Frost-Nixon interviews, and its one of the most significant moments in the movie Frost/Nixon as well. As I recall, its even how they ended the trailer for it. Yet, when you look at today's politics, you see that its considered a perfectly reasonable opinion that no investigations should be done of the use of torture during the Bush administration because we were in a post-9/11 world and the President was only trying to keep us safe. Sure, the Bush administration probably broke the law, but they did it for the very best of reasons. As shocking as it still sounds when its said as overtly as Nixon said it, it seems as though we've forgotten why that was such an outrageous thing for an American President to say in the first place. But, this isn't a political blog, and I digress.

Frost/Nixon was released last year and was one of the five nominated films for Best Picture at the last Oscars. It didn't win and I don't think it got robbed although it does have a lot going for it, first and foremost being the performance of Frank Langella as Nixon (he got an Oscar nod as well). It was directed by Ron Howard, who also directed the last movie I reviewed, Angels and Demons, although this fact probably wouldn't ever occur to you if you didn't read the credits of each one. Whereas Angels had all the hallmarks of a Hollywood summer blockbuster, Howard doesn't let Frost/Nixon stray too far away from its origins as a Broadway play. As they did in the play, Michael Sheen and the aforementioned Langella play the title roles of David Frost and Richard Nixon, and the movie remains narrowly focused on its few principal characters as a play would. Peter Morgan, who wrote the play, also wrote the screenplay, giving the movie something in common with another great adaptation from a play, Doubt. Here, Ron Howard directs his movie as sort of a combination of a stage production and a faux-documentary, as we'll see a scene or two and then see a clip of an ancillary character speaking directly into the camera, as if the person they were playing was giving an interview after the fact.

The movie is pretty much entirely structured around the Frost/Nixon interviews themselves. In the first act, we learn how they came to be and what everyone's motivations were for being involved with them going in. Frost--a British TV personality who was popular, wealthy, and on the "it list" socially, but a bit frustrated with how vapid some of his programming had become--gets a sudden inspiration to do the interview when watching coverage of Nixon's resignation and his subsequent farewell boarding the plane that's going to take him away to Califronia. Nixon is persuaded to do it by his aides which have remained by his side, who see Frost as a pushover, thus making it an execllent opportunity for Nixon to rebuild his character while making a ton of money in the process. Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) are journalists, scholars, and generally despise all things Nixon. They're chosen to be "cornermen" for Frost and his producers during the interview, and they want the interviews to serve as "the trial that Nixon never had." The second act is the preparation for the interviews, as Frost tries to strike a balance between doing the meticulous research that Zelnick and Reston demand, while trying to fly around the world putting a smile on his face for potential advertisers as he tries to cover the tremendous cost of making the interview happen. Meanwhile, Nixon and his camp are doing preparation of their own, but also wringing their hands at how much of a cakewalk its seemingly going to be. Finally, the last act of the movie is the interviews themselves, which Nixon initially dominates, playing psychological mindgames with Frost, to great effect, and pretty much controlling the pace and tone of the entire conversations. As time goes on, Frost, of course, overcomes this, leading up to the big "gotcha" moments like the one at the beginning of this post.

Before seeing the movie, I kept seeing interviews with Ron Howard describing how much he wanted to make a Frost/Nixon movie because of how enamored he was with the play, and especially the "boxing match" like quality that the entire story had, with each of the four interview tapings being like individual rounds in a match. In some ways, this is absolutely true. In the run-up to the interviews, we get montages of Frost, his lead producer, and his cornermen hunched over books late at night in the same way we see Rocky running up steps in a sweatjacket and punching pieces of meat to the tunes of "Eye of the Tiger" and "Push it to the Limit" in that franchise. And in between "rounds," we get Zelnick and Reston explaining to Frost everything he screwed up and everything he let Nixon get a way with, akin to an old crumungeoney boxing corner man slapping his fighter across the face and yelling stuff like "He's murderin' ya out there! You gotta want it!" But personally, as much as it may have been Howard's inspiration for making the movie, I didn't find this dynamic to be the most interesting part of it. As much as the trailers and Howard's descriptions seem to suggest otherwise, the actual interview tapings don't really have a whole lot of total screen time. Up until the final taping, where all of the Watergate details are addressed, we really only see the questions and answers from a couple of topics, and really only see enough of them to establish Nixon's tenacity and ruthlessness in a debate. Really the whole reason why the interviews eventually turn around for Frost and his corner (at least within world of the movie, perhaps not in real life), is because of an idea Reston mentions early on and which is ignored until the run-up to the final taping. That this was going to be the "eureka" moment of the whole plot seemed fairly obvious to me when its first brought up, and the tension of how Frost & co. are going to "get" Nixon in the end never really comes to much of a crescendo.

Of much more interest to me than the tit-for-tat of the interviews was how the movie portrayed Nixon as a man, and how Frank Langella portrays him. On one level, we see a man who is as ruthless and conniving enough to concieve of a scheme like Watergate and still want to get back into the political arena after getting thrown out of office for it. In some ways, Nixon seems destined to keep fighting the accusations against him because that's really all he knows how to do. On the morning of one of the tapings, we see Nixon looking out his window and jogging in place, "getting his game face on" if you will. This is who he is and what he does. On another level though, we see Nixon as a man being eaten away by guilt as well as some weird, deep-rooted inferiority complex. The night before the final taping, Nixon basically drunk dials Frost's hotel room, and once Frost answers he puts his phone on speaker, starts walking around his darkened living room and starts talking about how even being President isn't enough for all the stuck up Ivy league kids he went to school with. As much as Nixon has honed his skills in debate and political damage control, in some sense, Nixon has already lost his battle with Frost before it begins because of how broken a man he's become since being stripped of power.

Langella does an excellent job of highlighting the complexities of Nixon as a character, and even manages to make him maybe a tiny bit sympathetic. He plays him accurately enough for an audience to believe that its him, but doesn't ham up his impression of him to the point of parody. Martin Sheen is very good as Frost as well, but as I described above, his part of the story as the David going up against Goliath, is kind of predictable and just doesn't seem to have as much going on as Nixon's inner turmoil. Frost gets a love interest early on in the movie in the form of Caroline Cushing (Rebecca Hall), but she doesn't really seem to have much to do except to be there when Frost meets Nixon so Nixon can make snide, creepy comments about her. Without Frank Langella I don't know how good this movie would be, but with him its very good, if perhaps not one of the very best of 2008.

Angels and Demons

Angels and Demons (**1/2)

I don't profess to have an encyclopedic knowledge of every movie ever made, but I think I can say with confidence that Angels and Demons is the only movie ever made, or that ever will be made, in which the first scene is a funeral procession at the Vatican for the just-deceased pope, and the second scene takes place at the Large Hadron Collider (be careful how you spell that, by the way, or else it becomes a collider of something much different than super-fast particles). That's just the sort of movie this is though: a beat-the-clock suspense thriller that's chiefly concerned with setting up a big obstacle course for its hero to work his way through over the course of two hours so he can save everyone from the conveniently slow-activating bomb that's hidden in some undisclosed location. Of pretty much no concern is whether or not any of the specifics of how the hero accomplishes this make any sense whatsoever. If you're willing to suspend your disbelief throughout all of its silliness, its a fun ride that'll hold your interest for its 2 hour 20 minute run time. At the same time, it does have some major issues, and I don't know if it'll hold up all that well on repeat viewings.

As mentioned, the movie opens in Vatican City as the various rituals that accompany the death of a Pope are carried out, many of which seem to involve breaking all of the old Pope's stuff (the Ring of the Fisherman which the Pope wears is broken with a hammer). Then there's the Large Hadron Collider scene, where, in typical sciencey action movie fashion, a small vial containing a sustained bit of anti-matter (which apparently looks like a little purple cloud) is stolen from a super secret room with a retinal scanner at the door and a flashing red light to indicate that something is amiss. In what initially seems to be an unrelated incident, someone claiming to be part of the illuminati--the ancient anti-dogmatic, pro-science cult and long-time enemy of the Catholic church--has taken four preferiti, top candidates to be named the next Pope, hostage. One hostage is going to be executed at 8, 9, 10, and 11-o'clock, and then a bomb will be detonated at midnight which will destroy the Vatican, and a whole lot of Rome along with it. Surprise, surprise, the "bomb" is actually the anti-matter vial, which will cause a huge explosive reaction when the batteries of its containment field run dead. Apparently a regular old fashioned bomb isn't sciency enough for the illuminati. The Vatican dispatches a guy to find Robert Langdon, the character from The Da Vinci Code, the movie of which this is a sequel, played again by Tom Hanks. Langdon, a symbologist, agrees to come help after being shown a symbol with the word illuminati written in a fashion such that its the same right-side-up or upside-down which piques his interest. Also summoned to the Vatican is the alliteratively-named Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), a physicist who was the first to discover the Hadron Collider theft, along with the body of her dead father, who was killed in the process.

Langdon arrives on the scene at around 6:30 local time, roughly an hour and a half before the first Cardinal is going to be executed, yet for a good while he and everyone around him only seems to be in a moderate hurry. There's a lot of scenes of brisk walking, but not a lot of running until closer to the climax of the movie. There's time for Langdon to meet the rank and file of the Vatican police, who are divided as to whether or not an academic such as him is going to do any good. Langdon manages to get in a few jabs chastising the police and others around the Vatican for not knowing their history of Catholicism as well. Eventually, Langdon meets with the Camerlengo--essentially the interim pope--in his office, and convinces him to let him into the Vatican archives to search for clues to a cryptic message left in a video by the man claiming to represent the Illuminati holding the Cardinals hostage. At about 7:53, through a series of poetic riddles involving statues and other landmarks around Rome, Langdon thinks he's figured out where they have to go, and the Vatican police's magic drivers get Langdon and Vittoria halfway across Rome in about five minutes. This basic process is repated from the 8:00 hour until midnight, with a little bit more of the full picture of what's going on coming in place each time. Langdon genrally thinks out loud until he has a sudden revelation about where the next clue is, while Vittoria's job is generally to look hot and occasionally keep a running dialogue with Langdon as he throws out theories. Sometimes though, she comes up with something seemingly completely out of nowhere that she would seemingly have no reason to know as a physicist. Her character isn't really well developed, and there's a whole subplot involving journals her father kept that pretty much sputters out without producing anything significant. In the meantime, the Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor) is arguing for the Vatican to be evacuated, but is rebuked by the Cardinal who's going to head up the conclave to choose the new Pope, who says it should continue.

As much as I've been poking fun at the movie to this point, I did generally enjoy watching it. I didn't see Da Vinci Code nor have I read either of the books, and I went to see Angels and Demons with friends with some trepidation, given what I'd heard about it and Da Vinci Code before. While some of the criticisms I'd heard are prominently on display, I have to say that I do appreciate the fun of its basic idea. The Vatican, with all its history and all of its domga, makes a perfect backdrop for this kind of a detective story, and the detective story did generally hold my interest. As much as I was weighing the plausibility of the whole thing in some part of my mind the entire time, I was also generally excited to find out where it was going to go from there. There is a big reveal at the very end, after the main plot that I've described to this point has been resolved, that I'm sort of mixed on. On the one hand, it was generally unexpected, at least to me. At the same time though, it does extend the movie for a while longer after the whole adrenaline rush of "are they gonig to find the bomb in time?!" has come and gone, and I also think it might be to clever by half. It completely changes your view of one particular person within the Vatican hierarhy, and I'm ultimately not sure if it actually made him a more compelling character afterwards than how he was presented beforehand. Beyond that, there isn't really a lot of depth to the movie that would warrant repeat viewings once you already know all the twists and turns. There are some brief moments where the subject of Langdon's agnosticism comes up with various members of the chruch, but they're just that, moments. In a movie that takes place pretty much entirely within the Vatican, there's not really a lot of deep thoughts into the nature of religion.

Really, I think the most interesting idea presented in the movie is the nature of the whole Illuminati plot and its organization. The whole idea is that the Illuminati are supposed to value science above all else, and their loathing for the Catholic church comes from its historical shunning of science in favor of what the Illuminati would consider completely arbitrary conditions that are often totally contradicted by science. And yet, as Langdon tells us throughout the movie as decyphering all manner of old texts and symbols, the Illuminati in many ways seem equally obsessed with ritual and symbols. Clues are hidden in churches that both form a cross shape on a map of Rome, and at the same time contain landmarks that are related what were once considered the four main elements of science: earth, water, air, and fire. Was this an intentional commentary by either Dan Brown or the filmmakers to argue that men of science and men of religion really aren't all that different, or is it merely a result of them wanting to make Robert Langdon's quest to save the Vatican as epic and complex as possible? I'm not really sure. Whatever. I had fun with the movie taking it at face value and, frankly, that's more than I thought I was going to get out of it.

My Name is Bruce

My Name is Bruce (**1/2)

If you don't know who Bruce Campbell is, the long and short of it is that he's the quintessential B-movie actor. He's garnered a cult following mainly because of Sam Raimi's splatter-fest Evil Dead movies, along with a handful of other sci-fi/horror movies with even more ridiculous premises (Exhibit A: Maniac Cop -- "You have the right to remain silent... FOREVER!"). In My Name is Bruce, Campbell directs himself starring as himself (well, a caricature of himself) in a movie that's mostly making fun of himself. Its party a tounge-in-cheeck homage to B-horror movies, compltely with low-tech and not very convincing effects, and partly just Bruce Campbell having fun acting as if he's a complete washed-up deadbeat. Its a movie that's pretty rough around the edges, and not all of the jokes that get thrown out really work, but it is mostly enjoyable, and a mere 90 minutes long, so even if you hate it you don't have to put up with it for long.

The plot is almost too ridiculous to even go into, but, long story short, a teenage Bruce Campbell fan from the tiny mining town of Gold Like, Oregon is in the middle of a horror movie staple, a late-night romp through a foggy graveyard with a couple of girls for no real reason, when he unwittingly unleashes the ancient Chiense war God, Guan Di. Turns out that the graveyard houses the bodies of Chinese miners who were killed in a mining accident a hundred years ago, and a hex was put on the graveyard so that Guan Di would come and decapitate anyone who disturbed it. I think. Its not really completely clear and it doesn't really matter anyway. The point is an evil 8 foot tall Chinese God with glowing eyes and a big-ass halberd has been awakened and is pissed off. At any rate, Guan Di is loose and terrorizing random citizens of Gold Lick, and so Jeff, the aforementioned teenager, decides that the best solution is to kidnap Bruce Campbell, evidently working under the theory that a career of fighting fake movie monsters makes him qualified to fight an actual one. Bruce assumes that the monster is fake, and that the entire town is all in on an overly-elaborate prank by his agent.

That's pretty much all there is to say about the movie. In between the main plot concerning the all-important showdown with Guan Di, we see Bruce Campbell lampooning his career and himself in various ways: everything from Bruce on the set filming his new movie "Cave Alien 2" in which his character gets sprayed with yellow alien blood that's clearly dumped on him by a hand visible in the shot, to Bruce going home to his busted-up trailer where the mailbox is stuffed with adult magazines and he has flasks of booze stashed in every concievable location. Some of the gags are funnier than others. Bruce Campbell's comedic timing is generally excellent, although things are little more hit and miss with the supporting cast, many of which are bit players from Bruce Campbell movies of yore. There's a lot of old-school, Three Stooges-esque slapstick, which may lead to some eye rolls for those wanting something a little more clever and original. I think most everyone will find at least something to like, though, in the quick, silly, 90 minute movie that is My Name is Bruce.

Star Trek

Star Trek (***1/2)

Reviving old franchises with new movies is very much in vogue right now, and so it likely didn't come as much of a surprise to anyone when it was announced that a new Star Trek movie was in the works featuring new actors stepping into the shoes of the original crew. Less predictable, perhaps, was the manner in which it would return. Not quire a full Batman Begins or Casino Royale style "reboot," the movie instead uses a time-travel plot device to keep the story in the same "universe" as the original series, while changing the circumstances by which the crew came together, and, in one case, actually having a character meet his older self. Directed by J. J. Abrams-- who has seemingly become a household name now with the massive successes of his brainchild "Lost", and another big event movie, Cloverfield--the movie sets aside a lot of the technobabble, space-archaeology, and long-winded philosophical and ethical debates that often seem to go hand-in-hand with the series. In their place, he sets up a much louder, more action-oriented, more confrontational, and more operatic movie than we're used to seeing under the Star Trek moniker. Still, the movie is aware of the history that its building on (or, I guess, rewriting in this case), and while I imagine many of the die-hards who have been dressing up as Spock at conventions for the last 20 years will be put off by the movie's more simplistic, less science-y veneer, I thought that it struck more or less the right balance, and I think most others will as well. Its certainly entertaining.

The movie opens aboard a Federation ship that James Kirk's father, George, is serving on. James Kirk's mother is elsewhere on the ship, busy giving birth to him, when a giant Romulan ship appears seemingly out of nowhere and opens fire. Romulan's demand that the ship's captain come aboard their ship via a transport shuttle, and so the elder Kirk is left in charge in his absence. The captain doesn't come back alive, and so George Kirk is left in command, and goes down with the ship, going a good enough job of stalling to allow the rest of the ship's passengers, including his wife and just-born son to escape. We flash forward a few years later, and see that James Tiberius Kirk was quite the rebellious child, as he goes joyriding in his step-fathers car in a scene that will probably go down as the only time in Star Trek history that the Beastie Boys have been featured. Eventually, as he reaches physical if perhaps not mental adulthood, Kirk meets Captain Pike, the soon to be helmsman of the newly completed Starship Enterprise, after getting into a barfight with a bunch of his cadets. We get the somewhat cliched "Yeah, you're a reckloose, but I know there's potential in you because I know who your father was" conversation, and Kirk eventually agrees to join Starfleet Acadamy. In the meantime, on Vulcan, a young Spock makes a similar decision to join Starfleet, declining an invitation into a prestigious vulcan science guild, mainly because he was tired of being chided about how being half-human made him somehow weaker. Throw in a Bones McCoy, an Uhura, and a Checkov along the way (it takes a little while longer for Scotty to show up) and voila, you have the original Enterprise crew.

How closely the new interpretations of these characters matches the original varies from actor to actor. Chris Pine gives Kirk some of that certain swagger and brashness that he had in the old series, but stops short of trying to emulate William Shatner's oft-parodied "I'm going to put emphasis on whatever the hell words I want to in a sentence and you can't stop me" manner of speaking. Zachary Quinto, probably best known as playing Sylar on "Heroes" looks a lot like a young Leonard Nimoy, but gives Spock a certain arrogance to his whole "everything I do is dictated by logic" routine that I don't think was there before. Karl Urban, on the other hand, pretty much just tries to be the living embodiment of DeForest Kelly's old Bones McCoy, playing up all of his mannerisms to the fullest, from his inquisitive raised eye-brows, to his seemingly constant manic, bug-eyed, "I'm one step away from flipping out" demeanor. I think its almost too much, and when McCoy intentionally drugs Kirk to sneak him aboard a mission that he's supposed to be banned from, the movie becomes as slapstick as Star Trek has ever been, but damn is it fun to watch. The movie's villian is Nero (Eric Bana): the Romulan captain of the ship from the beginning of the film, who comes back 25 years later after killing Kirk's father to again do battle with a ship that Kirk wasn't supposed to be captain of but eventually ends up being just that. Nero is really only developed enough to explain what his motivations are, and certainly will not ever be mentioned in the same sentence as the nigh-universally agreed upon ultimate Trek villan Khan (or should I say KHAAAAAAAN). Said motivations have to do with the future destruction of his home-world Romulus, the circumstances of with don't really make a whole lot of sense. Really, Nero's whole plan doesn't make a whole lot of sense either in that it doesn't really solve the initial problem of his planet going kaput, and I guess it just has to be assumed that he's really pissed off and too blinded by revenge to really think things out. Nero is somewhat intriguing in the beginning of the film when he's cloaked in mystery, but as is so often the case, he becomes less interesting of a villain as we see more of him, and there really isn't all that much interesting to see here.

A whole bunch of the old series' oft-used elements show up here, presumably mostly meant as homages; thrown in with a wink and a nod. Kirk messes around with a voluptuous green-skinned alien woman, a redshirt gets killed as part of a dangerous away team mission while all the major characters survive, McCoy has at least three variations of "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor!" that I counted, and Scotty even throws in an "I've given 'er all she's got Cap'n!" As I said earlier, though, a lot of the heady, long-winded asides that Star Trek has been known to delve in to, especially once it reached the "Next Generation" era, are pretty much absent here. I'm not necessarily sad that they're gone, as even though they were interesting when they were done well, they often detracted from the suspense of the main plot (would you be more interested in a climactic battle with the borg, or a meandering debate on how best to interpret the Prime Directive?) I think sometimes, though, J. J. Abram's vision goes too far in the other direction, mostly content to settle into the "a wizard did it!!" mentality, as ships are sucked into black holes and characters haphazardly jump around in space-time. Whereas George Lucas created Star Wars to basically be a tribute to old swashbuckling adventure movies that took the tried and true formula from said movies and put it in the setting of outer space, Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek was always somewhat grounded in science, even if it was fictional science. I'm not sure that Abrams's pretty simplistic movie really holds true to that vision. With that said, if you don't own a mint-in-box Spock action figure that you bought at a Star Trek convention in 1983, you might not really give a damn about all that and just want to see an entertaining movie. The 2009 iteration of Star Trek--in all its loud, bombastic glory--is very much just that.

More pitching weirdness and the eternal struggle for the DH

In my last Cubs post, I mentioned how odd it was that Luis Vizciano, who the Cubs had signed to a $3.5 million deal in the offseason, was designated for assignment in order to call up Jeff Samardjia from AAA. The bullpen was going through quite a rough patch at that point--and really still hasn't perfromed as well as one would like--so its easy to see why Lou Pinella and Jim Hendry would want to make a change, but it certainly seemed like a drastic one, especially considering that the team supposedly signed Aaron Miles and let go of Mark DeRosa because of money issues. The difference between Miles and DeRosa, I believe, is only a few million dollars, and here we see the Cubs essentially paying Vizciano 3 1/2 million bucks to basically pitch for two weeks (two weeks in which, for the record, his ERA was 0.00, although I believe he let in some inherited runners). Letting go of DeRosa looks more and more confounding.

Vizciano was officially relased on Monday (bottom of this story), so he's not coming back. The thing is, since getting called up, Samardija has been knocked around quite a bit, and he has now been sent back down again in favor of Chad Fox. I don't think Vizciano was going to have a zero ERA all year. Throughout his career, he's been kind of an average reliever, probably a little better than what you'd consider "replacement level," so I wasn't expecting amazing things about him. However, I have sincere doubts that Chad Fox, who is now 38 and whose career was pretty much over due to a series of major injuries before he got an opportunity to come back with the Cubs, is going to be any better. I'm not sure if the Cubs badly overestimated how much Samardija was ready for the majors or what, but they really shouldn't have put themselves in a position where you're paying a guy $3.5 million to do nothing and then replacing him on the roster with an old, debilitated Chad Fox. Vizciano was never going to be a regular back-of-the-bullpen guy or anything, so maybe this isn't really a huge crisis, but it does look pretty silly on the Cubs' part.

Update: Since I first starting writing this on Thursday (its now Monday), Chad Fox has now been put on the DL with his career once again in jeopardy. In 2 appearances he had a 135.00 ERA. See why this was a bad idea?

------------------

Meanwhile, something which has caused a major freakout amongst Cubs nation has been the injury to Carlos Zambrano, who is going to be out for at least a couple of weeks after pulling his hamstring running out a bunt. Zambrano was safe on the play, and even though he had to be pinch-run for, his run was one of 4 driven in on a tie-breaking Derrek Lee grand slam later that inning. The Cubs ended up winning the game 6-4. In spite of this, starting immediately after the game, a faction of Cubs fans started blaming Zambrano for getting hurt, dreaming up an unwritten rule of baseball that pitchers should never try to bunt for a hit because of the risk of injury. The whole idea of this is pretty bizarre to me. Of course, running out a bunt has the potential for injury, but so does a lot of stuff in baseball. If Zambrano would've swung away on that at-bat and hit a grounder that one of the opposing infielders had to make a diving play to keep in the infield and then throw to first from his knees, is he not supposed to run that out either? If he's in the field, and Derrek Lee has to dive to make a play on a sharply hit ball down the foul line, should Zambrano not run full-out to get over to cover first base?

The point is, the line drawn by fans here as when its not right to "try" on a play, is totally arbitrary. There are many valid criticisms of Zambrano, like his famous temper on the mound that once boiled over into a fist-fight with Michael Barrett, but one thing Zambrano's never been accused of, and for good reason, is not caring enough. This play should be no different. That he cares enough to try and leg out a well placed bunt-and succeed in doing so in an inning that eventually leads to a grand slam--should be celebrated, not criticized. You'll often hear it said that pitching is an inherently unnatural act for the human body. When you consider how many pitchers at some point need major surgery because of a ligiment tear in their elbow or something of that ilk, or see pitchers who get hurt and then lose about 5 miles off of their fastball when they come back and are never really the same pitcher, its easy to believe that statement.

Weirder still, is this Phil Rogers column using the Zambrano injury as evidence that the NL needs to adopt the DH. It seems like most everyone who follows baseball has strong opinions on the DH, one way or another. Either they advocate both leagues using it or both leagues not using it. Having one league use it and one league not seems to bother a lot of people. Personally, its never really bothered me. Its one of the things that makes baseball unique to other team sports, along with each ballpark having its own dimensions. Why should ballpark dimensions be different from place to place but not DH rules? If you believe the MLB needs to have "the standard set of rules that exists in the NFL, NBA and NHL," shouldn't the playing field dimensions always be the same? I like the fact that you can watch two different styles of play on any given night, especially in Chicago with both the Cubs and White Sox on local TV. Even if you're like Rogers, however, and really want the DH implemented, I'm not sure how the Zambrano injury really ties into that all that much. As I already wrote, pitchers can get hurt doing most anything on the field, as can any other player. I'm not sure how you can eliminate pitchers batting and say "Okay, now we've ensured that we've gotten rid of all the pitching injuries that weren't really supposed to have happened." And how about telling Micah Owings that pitchers shouldn't hit.