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Irish Examiner
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
The best sports films and what others fail to capture
There is a special subgenre in sport of gloriously slow deception. A weird trick that exists to catch an opponent off-guard and make them look foolish. Think of football's Panenka or a tennis drop shot during heavy baseline rallies. Baseball has its own version too, although it is rarely seen in the professional game anymore. An Eephus pitch is a few degrees short of a dummy. The ball is thrown incredibly slowly, with a high, floated arc that is intended to confuse the batter. It is the opposite of a fastball and therefore an oddity in a sport that is increasingly focused on power, efficiency and data-driven precision. Modern baseball, like much of life, has little room for something that simply floats. That kind of pitch is the perfect namesake for a small, independent movie called, 'Eephus,' a sports film about a Sunday league game between a bunch of casual players in Douglas, Massachusetts, the last one before the diamond field is bulldozed. Adler's Paint and Riverdogs adult-league teams have played regularly at Soldier's Field, the public pitch serving their small town. Now the road is taking them away from this place. A sleepy crackle of a local radio broadcast opens the film, listing the accident report for the local county and the breaking news of a coyote that had been terrorising local dogs had been killed. There is the unfortunate development that the Topbury candy corn eating competition is cancelled because the whiz kid who could count really fast to tally all the candy corns had moved away. Then comes confirmation that the vote to repurpose central county land has passed. The home of Douglas baseball is the casualty. There are no plans for a replacement field. Part comedy, part elegy, Eephus is a quiet delight. The story takes place over the course of a single day. It feels destined to take its place among the baseball films that have become part of the sport's cultural heritage. What boxing has been to literature, baseball has been to cinema. Bull Durham, A League of Their Own and Moneyball have another partner. It also belongs in another category. The movies where nothing really happens. Ones not really about anything but also everything. The men range from those just starting work to those close to retirement, from lean to comfortably padded. The arc begins as they arrive and ends soon after the final inning. Eephus (2025) It is about the people who turn up for the love of the game or simply through habit. Those who play just so they can light fireworks at the end. The ones who come to drink. The Italian player on a diet who is met with a volley of jibes about pizza and cannoli. The onlooking teens who rightly see them as simply 'plumbers and shit.' Those that smile and nod in agreement at one of the film's many philosophical questions: 'Is there anything more beautiful than the sun setting on a fat man stealing second base?' Co-writer Nate Fisher plays the pitcher for Adler's Paint and he makes sure the central metaphor is clear. The star component is in the dialogue. In how it shows men who do not want to talk about certain things yet find ways to talk about them indirectly. In how the old gives way to the new and sometimes you cannot even be angry about it. A school will be built on the site. The only other diamond is far away and stinks. For many of these players, this is their last ever game. Gradually they begin to realise it. It makes you stop. Stare. Think. Consider how sport has a curious ability to run alongside life. It is not only an outlet. It's not the point in itself. It is the space between those positions. Remember the early weeks after moving to Australia and searching Ticketmaster for a single ticket to afternoon AFL matches simply to have something to do. Remember looking around the back bleachers and noticing the other men doing the exact same, the realm of the solitary and the searching. Reminisce on how sport itself was the most reliable mechanism to make friends in the subsequent weeks. How bad we can be at properly talking to those friends. It is a tribute to wistful nostalgia, even when we know it can be overly-sentimental or impractical. To low-stakes shoot-the-shit toss-arounds. To embracing those toss-arounds while we still can, even if it means scouring woods for errant balls or illuminating the field with car headlights when darkness descends. And how the world is changing all around us. It is not right to say this decade of sports movies have been barren. King Richard, The Iron Claw, The Way Back were all above decent. But the landscape is dominated by corporate promos like Air or the unfocused slog that is Happy Gilmore 2. Watching Eephus from Ireland is a challenge in itself. You can read your favourite critic's review of it, but streaming is another matter entirely. The official website lists five platforms for digital viewing, none of which work in this region. It becomes another example of the familiar frustration with modern film distribution, the way the system so often feels broken, how anyone who follows the conversation can be left waiting months for the film many are talking about, left with the creeping sense of FOMO. Why it is often so difficult to see the titles that fill the annual best-of lists? In the year of 2025, they are still somehow getting it wrong. Sometimes, it feels like it is getting worse. Eephus is a shining example of show, don't tell. It explores the gap between the sunrise and fall, in the rituals that vanish quietly, the games that happen not for glory but our own sense of belonging. This is a sports film that leaves you with a sense of why these moments matter and an unspoken farewell to the stuff that is slowly fading away.
Chicago Tribune
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Eephus' is a fond farewell to a small-town baseball field in its last inning
'Is this how it's gonna end?' By the time one of the small-town, middle-aged baseball players in director Carson Lund's disarming debut feature 'Eephus' says that line, it's very late, very dark and, for the old baseball field — Soldier's Field by name, a little smaller than Chicago's Soldier Field — it's the final inning before the ballfield is to be razed to make way for a new middle school. Places come; places go. Every human being deals with loss differently. 'Eephus' acknowledges that, but it's a sweet, sidewinding paradox of a sports movie: sentimental in a quietly unsentimental and offhandedly comic fashion. Lund's film confines the movie almost entirely to the nearly departed ballfield, before, during and after its final game. Yet it doesn't feel confining. Enough happens on or near any baseball diamond to get a movie out of it, if the right filmmakers are at the plate. Lund and cinematographer Greg Tango shoot and light 'Eephus' in grandly scaled digital widescreen imagery, in daylight, sunset hours and the cloak of night, and that too is a useful paradox. Not much happens, but every shot is composed like a widescreen mini-epic of downtime and hangtime, without much happening or any earnest revelations to solemnize things. We're hanging with the last remaining players on two amateur league rivals, the Riverdogs (wearing blue) and Adler's Paint (in red). The movie takes its title for the unfashionable floater of a nearly unhittable pitch, long, high and vexing. 'Stays in the air forever,' one player complains, adding: 'You get bored watching it.' The plot of 'Eephus' can be taken care of quickly, because there isn't one. We get to know the players a little, simply by overhearing casual, back-and-forth observations and insults and banter. Some of them will truly, madly, deeply miss this place, and playing there. Others, less so; a couple of these men have been hanging on to this tradition, and their time away from other things, family or otherwise, with a certain amount of guilt attached. My favorite character in 'Eephus' is an observer, not a player: Franny, a twitchy charmer and die-hard Soldier's Field regular played by Cliff Blake in a superb casting stroke. Franny's devoted to careful, even obsessive statistical reporting on each new set of innings. He has been for most of his many decades. Setting up his folding table for this final match-up, we see a man in his element. It's merely a bonus when Blake re-creates the most famous line from the 1942 Lou Gehrig biopic 'Pride of the Yankees,' taken from Gehrig's moving 1939 pronouncement that he's 'the luckiest man on the face of the earth.' This makes 'Eephus' sound like pure corn, which it isn't. Its wit beams on and off a little, but it's nice and dry. The script, co-written by Michael Basta, Nate Fisher and director Lund, has the simplest of structures and while there are complications and demi-crises, on the field and off, it's all a part of the fabric. The innings come and go, as does the sound of a local radio personality (the movie's set in the 1990s, more or less) voiced by legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. 'Is this how it's gonna end?' The line comes near the end, though early in the movie, one character says the old ballfield will go 'the way of the Hindenburg,' which sounds pretty grandiose. When the end arrives — and I sorely wish the final shot was the terrific image of Franny, filmed from behind, watching the players drive off for the last time — the feelings and memories in progress weigh more than you'd expect. 'Eephus' — 3 stars (out of 4) No MPA rating (some coarse language) How to watch: Premieres March 21 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.
Los Angeles Times
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘Eephus,' a day of baseball comes to life in all its loose-limbed, adult-league glory
Weekend warriors on their beloved Massachusetts field of battle, fighting a setting sun, form the warmly gruff, jersey-clad roster of 'Eephus,' Carson Lund's appealing beer toast of a baseball picture about a final small-town showdown on a soon-to-be-razed ballpark. The title, pulled from the pastime's rich glossary, refers to an arced throw of such deliberately underwhelming velocity that it confounds the batter. What's been pitched here, however, has enough wonderfully lived-in bend, air and tempo to keep from straying off course. Baseball movies are so often engineered for big-game glory moments, they've forgotten the part that's like an afternoon game of catch. (Something 'Bull Durham' filmmaker Ron Shelton got, admittedly.) Lund, making his feature directing debut after establishing himself as a noteworthy indie cinematographer (most recently on 'Christmas Eve at Miller's Point'), is fan enough of the recreation-league vibe to favor that atmosphere of sun, swigs and swats (the literal and the trash-talking kind) over some predictable competition narrative. His breezy, bittersweet hang of a movie is all the better for it. Not that the visiting River Dogs, led by calm founder Graham (Stephen Radochia), don't want to crush home team Adler's Paint — and vice versa — on this last chance face-off before a school is erected on their cherished diamond. As a bright October day unfolds, the contest mingles with an unavoidable sense of inevitability, but not enough for these once-a-week chums to unnecessarily sentimentalize the situation. Especially when a proper taunt might give you an edge, or at least a good laugh. It's a true ensemble: Altmanesque with a bit of Richard Linklater's eccentricity. The standouts include Keith William Richards, David Pridemore and Theodore Bouloukos in varying shades of appealing grizzledness, with a hilarious appearance by former Red Sox pitcher Bill 'Spaceman' Lee as an interloper who's like the guest turn in an old-school variety show. Lund directs Greg Tango's cinematography toward widescreen compositions and genteel tracking shots of autumnal poetry, allowing every weary soul a ruminative closeup to go with their sharply detailed micro-dramas about the finer points of game play, someone's annoying traits or life's general indignities. 'Eephus,' which Lund wrote with Michael Basta and Nate Fisher (also playing the reliever who explains the film's title, a lazy, hanging pitch) is set in the 1990s, but the only real clues are the cars and a boombox. The constant radio chatter — which includes the unlikely announcing voice of legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman — doesn't give the era away, nor do the younger characters' hairstyles, since mullets and dreads endure. And that well-thumbed score pad, in which league habitue Franny (a memorable Cliff Blake) pencils in balls, strikes and runs from his fold-up table, could just be an old-timer's personal choice. Elsewhere, the accouterments of middle age — paunches, unkempt beards, intransigence, teasing, a resigned air — are as timeless for human comedy as the melancholic notion that all things run out: daylight, a hired ump's hours, a 12-pack's buzz, an irritable player's patience. The rules of baseball, of course, defy time, and 'Eephus' embraces shagginess as a virtue, almost to a fault. Go grab a hot dog or drink mid-movie. Lund's no-rush, anti-narrative pacing encourages it. That's baseball too. As is the risk, however, that you'll miss that homer or, in this case, that exquisitely framed shot or wonderfully exasperated glance. Maybe the most rewarding quality 'Eephus' displays as a first-ballot hall of fame sports movie is the dedication of Lund and company to just being what they are: no-nonsense celebrants of something ephemeral yet enduring. They just want to get a good long look at everything before it fades completely.
Atlantic
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Is an Ode to the Beauty of Baseball
An eephus pitch is one of baseball's many pieces of niche ephemera. It's a weird trick throw that's barely ever glimpsed in the professional game—an arcing lob of the ball, traveling at half the speed or less than a normal pitch; it exists only to catch batters off guard. In the director Carson Lund's beguiling debut film, also called Eephus, a player named Merritt Nettles (played by Nate Fisher) specializes in tossing the pitch and rhapsodizes about its time-stopping sorcery: 'It's kinda like baseball. I'm looking around for something to happen—poof, the game's over.' If the previous paragraph made your eyes glaze over, you may not be the movie's intended audience. But to me, these details are pure poetry, and so is Eephus. The plot-free hangout flick quietly has a ton to say about baseball's eternal appeal, even as the sport weathers the passage of time. Set during the 1990s in Massachusetts, it follows the last recreational-league matchup between two groups of shambling, beer-guzzling baseball enthusiasts; they're clashing once more before a planned development will pave over the site. Eephus is an elegy, but with just the barest hint of sentimentality—a shrugging send-off that simultaneously cares deeply about America's pastime. The film begins with the league's sole enthusiast, Franny (Cliff Blake), settling onto the grass with his portable card table, his pocket binoculars, and his scorecard; slowly, the players begin to dribble onto the field. In red are the members of a team called Adler's Paint, and in blue are the Riverdogs. The history between the two squads is irrelevant, and there's barely any information to glean from their overheard dialogue. Instead, Lund (who also co-wrote the film's script with Fisher and Michael Basta) revels in the minor details, such as the players' many forms of inventive facial hair and their cute little practice rituals. The drama that does arise feels minor, too, such as a brief moment of panic when the Riverdogs realize that their ninth player hasn't shown up yet, which would force them to forfeit. Otherwise, Eephus 's story never goes anywhere. Even though it's clear that at least some of the actors know how to play the game, there isn't much intense activity to take in. Over and over, the viewer sees shots of players briefly crouching in anticipation of something happening (namely, the delivery of a pitch to a batter), then relaxing when it doesn't. That's the magic of baseball: blissful anticipation, with the occasional chance for real action. In lieu of narrative progression, Lund is singularly intent on generating an atmosphere that makes the viewer feel like they're perched in the bleachers. The perfectly calibrated sound design contributes to this heavily; it is expansive and plangent, with the clack of the bat and popping of the ball heard more distinctly than the yelled instructions or friendly banter from base runners. The director's attentive scene-setting helps transform Eephus into a dispatch from another era—a memory bouncing through the decades to somehow reach theaters today. The throwback vibe is further cultivated by the cast, which comes across like a cheerfully old-school collection of performers. Among them is the Boston Red Sox alum Bill 'Spaceman' Lee, one of Major League Baseball's best-known practitioners of the eephus pitch back in the 1970s, who appears in a cameo role. The rest of the actors, most of them unfamiliar names, look like they could have walked onto the set through a time tunnel; their stringy beards, craggy faces, and protruding guts recall those of the players from Lee's era. The renowned 95-year-old documentarian (and fellow Bostonian) Frederick Wiseman also joins to dispense pearls of wisdom in voice-over, dropping well-known quotations from the ball-playing greats between innings. Looking backwards feels inherent to baseball, and I mean this in the warmest manner possible. The game is like the Academy Awards or burger making: an American tradition that, in my opinion, needs little in the way of reinvention. Still, although Lund isn't going for any major tear-jerking moments, his movie invokes the melancholy sense of something important passing into the mists. None of the characters is able to use a smartphone or check social media, given the period setting, but the couple of kids sitting in the stands observe the amateur teams' particular brand of fun as if it's from the Stone Age. Lund cited the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's 2003 masterpiece, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, as an inspiration for Eephus. The comparison is apt on a surface level; Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a famous example of 'slow cinema' set in a soon-to-be-closed Taipei theater—an antiquated edifice not unlike an aging ballpark. The film discursively follows some of the picture house's regulars as they attend its last showtime. Beyond their similar presentations, it's also Eephus 's kindred spirit thematically: Each one is a quirky ode to a particular hobby that is still extant in our life, albeit becoming something of a relic. Eephus succeeds as a beautiful portrait of a specific pastime. It's also, delightfully, a low-stakes hang with some dudes swigging Narragansetts—much like baseball itself.
Boston Globe
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
‘Eephus' is a good-natured hangout movie about one final ball game at a beloved field
When I saw 'Eephus' at the New York Film Festival last year, I was on the fence about it. Readers know I'm a huge baseball fan, but I was worn out by the end of the movie. I had a better time watching the same actors play a real live baseball game a few days later, Advertisement Players from Adler's Paint in "Eephus." From left: Jeff Saint Dic, David Torres Jr., Theodore Bouloukos, Ethan Ward, John R. Smith Jr., and Brendan "Crash" Burt. Music Box Films With their diet of multiple movies per day, film festivals can be exhausting. While I trust my reactions to films I either love or hate, it's the movies that lurk on the thin line between a positive and negative review that I always want to revisit when they finally get a general release date. Such is the case with 'Eephus,' because I honestly couldn't remember anything I actively disliked about the film other than the fact that it felt a bit too dragged out by the end. So, I went to see it again before filing this review. I didn't expect my opinion to change, to be honest; I thought this was going to remain a ★★½ review. But somehow, the movie didn't overstay its welcome this time, and I enjoyed it more. Lund has crafted a good-natured hangout movie that tells the story of one final game at Soldiers Field, a New Hampshire-set diamond slated for demolition the following day. (The film was shot in Douglas, Mass.) The game lasts into the night, on a field with no lights. We can hardly see what's going on by then, which is kind of funny. But it shows the commitment of the film's characters, a motley crew of men of varying ages playing on two sponsored teams, Adler's Paint and the Riverdogs. They've convened on Oct. 16 — a Sunday — to play the final game of the final season of an adult competitive league that's been around for quite some time. Advertisement Little mini-dramas lazily unfold. One team only has eight players, because one of the guys has something else to do. And it's clear that Father Time has been encroaching on the bodies of the older men. 'The worst part of this sport is the running,' we're told, and though everyone does their best to hustle, it's obvious that their best days are mere memories now. The film has a raggedy pace not unlike the runners who succeed or fail to score. Still, these guys are here to play, and they take it seriously. They have returned to Soldiers Field every year like the swallows return to Capistrano; it's more by instinct and routine than conscious thought. The film quietly contemplates the minor tragedy of losing such a familiar and comforting location. There are so many characters here it's hard to keep them straight. I don't think the film expects you too, either. You'll recognize everyone, and there are some standouts like grumpy Adler's Paint coach Ed (Keith William Richards), rival Riverdogs coach Graham (Stephen Radochia), a sincere player named Cooper (Conner Marx), and beer-loving Riverdog Troy (David Pridemore). Your beloved Red Sox even get a shoutout, represented by Bill 'Spaceman' Lee, a purveyor of the weird, slow pitch that gives the film its title. 'Uncut Gems''s Wayne Diamond also has a cameo. Cliff Blake in "Eephus." Music Box Films Additionally, the voice of documentarian Frederick Wiseman is heard every so often on the soundtrack, and the game itself is scored by actor Cliff Blake, who sits behind what looks like a TV tray of sorts, armed with his book of stats. When I attended the baseball game in Manhattan, I went to Blake to check the score. It was as if I'd walked into the movie. Advertisement That's probably the best way to describe 'Eephus' — watching it feels as if you are in the bleachers of Soldiers Field. ★★★ EEPHUS Written and directed by Carson Lund. Starring Cliff Blake, Conner Marx, Keith William Richards, David Pridemore, Stephen Radochia, Bill 'Spaceman' Lee, Wayne Diamond, Frederick Wiseman. At the Coolidge, Somerville Theatre, Dedham Community Theater. 98 min. Unrated (salty language, as per a baseball game) Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe's film critic.
