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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.
Los Angeles Times
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
He remembers a different kind of baseball, relaxed and chatty. ‘Eephus' gets it on film
Controversially, the implementation of a pitch clock in 2023 effectively transformed the experience of both playing and watching major league baseball. By undermining the pitcher's authority on how the innings flow, the timekeeper shortens a game's duration. Now, as filmmaker and recreational ballplayer Carson Lund points out, America's pastime has become just another transactional activity — something you can schedule to get in and out of. A once leisurely sport has been forced to fit the demands of our hyperspeed culture. 'I find it cynical,' Lund, 33, tells me as we sit on a picnic table in Elysian Park across from a field with teenage boys at baseball practice. 'At its purest, and the way it was for 100 years, baseball is a game that could take five, six hours if it had to. It created its own sense of time and theoretically could go on forever.' The desire to portray baseball's enrapturing quality propelled Lund to co-write and direct his debut feature, 'Eephus' (now in theaters), an amusing and delightfully acted dramedy set in the 1990s about two adult recreational teams in suburban Massachusetts playing one last game before their local field is demolished and turned into a school. As day turns into night, the men play on, never quite managing to express their shared sorrow over the loss, which yields both humor and pathos. Their friendships are bound by baseball and might not extend beyond the field, yet Lund thinks of these team-driven relationships as authentic, even if tenuous. 'You work through your feelings through the language of the game and competitive banter,' Lund says. 'The banter in the film is very regional, feels like New England to me, a place where sports are so much a part of the culture that they've infused the vernacular.' Lund says he never much cared for baseball movies. All of them, he thinks, lack the rhythms of the game because, as with a pitch clock, they are 'ultimately subservient to the demands of Hollywood narratives.' 'They're so often fixated on individuals who are going through some sort of transformation and the game is simply a metaphor for that,' explains Lund. 'I wanted to immerse you in this single day on a single field and create a more collective experience with a large ensemble who are all dealing with the same thing, which is saying goodbye to a ritual, saying goodbye to a version of themselves that they create on that field together.' Lund's approach to a deeply American subject involved pacing and formal choices that one might more often associate with European art films or even Asian 'slow cinema.' Lund aimed to evoke the longing of Taiwan-based master Tsai Ming-liang's 2003 film 'Goodbye, Dragon Inn,' about the last showing at a movie theater about to close. 'I was interested in the bittersweet, funeral quality that suffuses Tsai's film,' Lund says. 'The films I love the most are the ones that privilege some degree of distraction or floating attention and allow you to luxuriate in the atmosphere.' An avid cinephile whose broad smile often illuminates his face, Lund started watching Stanley Kubrick and Ingmar Bergman movies at a young age through his father's recommendations. He's especially confident when talking baseball. Lund found the ideal field for 'Eephus' in the small city of Douglas, Mass., after visiting more than 100 diamonds across New England. 'I wanted a field that felt like it had been degraded by time with old wood, chipped paint and a sense of history,' he says. Since his cast of characters is, in his words, 'over the hill' — adult men ranging from rusty to out of shape, in a recreational league where the stakes are as low as they can be — Lund could focus on conveying the feeling of community by embracing a bit of chaos and capturing the action in wide shots. 'I wanted to see the interaction between all these different bodies moving around and the distance between everyone,' he explains. 'There are many qualities of baseball that aren't shared by any other major sport. It's very unique.' Born into a Boston Red Sox-loving household, Lund grew up in Nashua, N.H., and played shortstop in a traveling league. His father, who played throughout his life until recently due to an ailing knee, encouraged Lund and his brother to do it out of love for the game, never as an obligation. Lund played the coveted infield position in part because he looked up to Nomar Garciaparra, star player for the Red Sox in the late '90s and early aughts. Though he aspired to the majors, Lund eventually found the competitiveness among young men with similar ambitions too toxic. 'I just stopped, which broke my dad's heart,' he says. 'I was more interested in exploring creative outlets.' A high school job at his local library fed Lund's growing appetite for international cinema. Moving to sunny Los Angeles, where the fervor for the Dodgers is palpable wherever you go, rekindled Lund's fondness for the sport. For the last eight years he's played recreationally in the Soldiers, a team that's part of the Pacific Coast Baseball League. Some of his longtime Soldiers teammates were aware he was making a baseball movie, and they all attended the AFI Fest screening of 'Eephus' in Hollywood in October. 'There's no competition in this league,' Lund notes. 'I found it very relaxing and joyful. It's a sport, so you're exerting yourself, but the meditative qualities of baseball really started to stand out to me. The qualities you see in the film.' For Lund, filmmaking has always been a team sport. The screenplay for 'Eephus' emerged from the collaboration with childhood friend Michael Basta, part of the independent film collective Omnes Films with Lund, and Nate Fisher, with whom Lund first became acquainted while attending screenings at the Harvard Film Archive. The writing started over Zoom at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic with them asking each other what they would want to see in a baseball game. What archetypes would need to be included? That involved creating a box score, a visual map of the fictional game that would unfold throughout the film. 'Carson knew the game play, Nate knows fun, weird, trivial parts of baseball and I had the off-the-field stuff,' says Basta via Zoom. 'It was a funny mix of different baseball minds.' The trio first figured out what happened inning by inning. Once they had that structure, the process entailed discussing when and how to spend time with each of the characters without prioritizing one over another. 'It was about negotiating the push-pull between speed and stasis,' says Lund. 'That's what baseball's all about. These long periods of nothing happening and then bursts of action. I wanted to tease out those passages of nothingness and show that there's actually a lot happening.' In turn, Fisher agreed to participate as long as he could cast himself playing a character based on his all-time favorite player, Zack Greinke, a prodigious pitcher known for his deadpan sense of humor and idiosyncratic personality. More importantly, Greinke still occasionally throws the archaic 'eephus' pitch that lends the movie its title. 'We needed a guy to sit on the sideline and explain the whole theme of the movie in three minutes or less,' Fisher says during a video interview. 'I gave that to myself because it's really easy to act when you write your own lines. I hope [Greinke] gets to see this movie.' As Fisher's character, Merritt — who wears the number 21 like Greinke did when he played for Fisher's beloved team, the Arizona Diamondbacks — puts it, the eephus is 'a type of curve ball that is pitched so unnaturally slow that it confuses the batter … makes him lose track of time.' Notable among the many cast members is the voice of legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman ('Titicut Follies,' 'Central Park') as a radio announcer. Initially, Lund intended to have him play an on-camera role, but Wiseman's advanced age — he is 95 — complicated his involvement. Lund would love to see the veteran nonfiction storyteller make one of his acclaimed observational works about baseball. 'It wasn't just that I liked his voice,' Lund says about reaching out to Wiseman. 'I felt that by putting him in the film, I was telling the audience that this is more of an anthropological film than it is a traditional narrative. It's sort of a cue.' Red Sox fans also will delight in a late cameo by Bill Lee, nicknamed 'Spaceman,' an eccentric baseball luminary who, quite famously, also threw the eephus to catch people off guard. 'Having his name attached helped us secure financing,' Lund recalls. While none of the adult characters in 'Eephus' serve as direct proxies for Lund ('If I were in the film, it would be a better shortstop,' he boasts, endearingly), he did find a way to obliquely put himself in the film. Halfway through the game, a kid and his father show up to practice but discover the field is occupied. It's a brief but personally significant moment. 'It's actually my dad playing the dad and the kid is wearing my jersey of the New Hampshire Grizzlies from when I was in my traveling league,' Lund recalls, smiling. His proud father attended the film's premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Baseball, now filtered through filmmaking, seems to function for Lund as an unspoken gesture of genuine love. What could be more precious than time shared on a field? He bleeds Red Sox blood, so you won't catch him cheering for the Dodgers any time soon, but L.A. has grown on him nonetheless. 'At Dodger Stadium you can watch the sunset over the mountains,' he says, painting a scene. 'It's a beautiful experience.'
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.
Gulf Today
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
‘Eephus' is the best baseball movie since ‘Moneyball'
In Carson Lund's 'Eephus,' two teams — the Riverdogs and Adler's Paint — gather on a neighbourhood field for a baseball game. The leaves are already starting to turn — 'It's getting late early,' as Yogi Berra said — and this is to be the final game for their adult rec league. The field is to be demolished. No one would confuse them for all-stars. A suicide squeeze unfolds in creaky slow motion. The rotund left fielder mutters 'Mother McCree' under his breath when the ball is hit in the gap. But, regardless of skill level, they all care sincerely about the game. 'Eephus,' as leisurely as a late-August double header, simply unfolds along with their game. Except to chase a foul ball or two, the movie stays within the lines of Soldier Field, the nondescript Massachusetts baseball field they're playing on sometime in the 1990s. It spans nine innings, with dugout chatter and fading light. In this slow-pitch gem of a baseball movie — a middle-aged 'Sandlot' — time is slipping away, but they're going down swinging. Money, analytics and whatever's on ESPN can sometimes cloud what sports is to most people: A refuge. 'Eephus,' in that way, is a change-up of a baseball movie, an elegiac ode to the humbler weekend warriors who are driven by nothing but genuine affection for the game. Richly detailed and mordantly deadpan, 'Eephus' adopts their pace of play, soaking up all the sesame-seed flavour that goes along with it. The title comes from an unnaturally slow pitch not slung but lobbed toward home. When I was a kid pitching, I liked to uncork one from time to time, much to my coach's dismay. The metaphor isn't hard to grasp. One player describes it as a pitch you can get bored watching, even making you lose track of time. Much of the same applies to 'Eephus,' which drifts player to player, play to play, less as an ensemble piece than like a roving spectator. The guys, themselves, have no more than a handful of fans, including the diehard scorekeeper Fanny (Cliff Blake). Frederick Wiseman, the great documentarian whose films chronicle nothing so much as institutions kept alive over time, is the voice of the announcer. I earlier called Lund's film an ode, but it's not a sentimental movie. Time's passage, which no ballgame or perfectly thrown eephus can halt, grows increasingly disquieting as the afternoon light gives way to nightfall. That, to finish the game, they play into near-total darkness, with only headlights to see the ball, is a sign of desperation as much as it is commitment. After all, one guy in the dugout is listening to a radio broadcast of a ballgame, from 1972. What's being lost? It's not a strip mall the field is to be turned into but something harder to quibble with: a school. They could drive half an hour to another field, but that's said to be half Little League, half farmer's market. They aren't a collection of pals, either. They don't hang out away from the diamond. Things they don't talk about: work, families, politics. Things they do: eyecare for the ump. In the annals of baseball movies, 'Eephus' doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame with 'Bull Durham' or 'A League of Their Own.' The closest it gets to the big leagues is an appearance by Bill 'Spaceman' Lee, the 1970s southpaw and eephus adherent. But 'Eephus' is just as deserving of a place in that hardball pantheon, only in some minor ball realm, well below single A. Here, they don't throw 'high cheese' but such meatballs that, as one player riffs, you could call it pasta primavera. To call this a field of dreams would be pushing it. But it's a lovely way to pass some time.
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Movie Review: 'Eephus' is the best baseball movies since 'Moneyball'
In Carson Lund's 'Eephus,' two teams – the Riverdogs and Adler's Paint – gather on a neighborhood field for a baseball game. The leaves are already starting to turn — 'It's getting late early,' as Yogi Berra said — and this is to be the final game for their adult rec league. The field is to be demolished. No one would confuse them for all-stars. A suicide squeeze unfolds in creaky slow-motion. The rotund left fielder mutters 'Mother McCree' under his breath when the ball is hit in the gap. But, regardless of skill level, they all care sincerely about the game. 'Eephus,' as leisurely as a late-August double header, simply unfolds along with their game. Except to chase a foul ball or two, the movie stays within the lines of Soldier Field, the nondescript Massachusetts baseball field they're playing on sometime in the 1990s. It spans nine innings, with dugout chatter and fading light. In this slow-pitch gem of a baseball movie — a middle-aged 'Sandlot' — time is slipping away, but they're going down swinging. Money, analytics and whatever's on ESPN can sometimes cloud what sports is to most people: A refuge. 'Eephus,' in that way, is a change-up of a baseball movie, an elegiac ode to the humbler weekend warriors who are driven by nothing but genuine affection for the game. Richly detailed and mordantly deadpan, 'Eephus" adopts their pace of play, soaking up all the sesame-seed flavor that goes along with it. The title comes from an unnaturally slow pitch not slung but lobbed toward home. When I was a kid pitching, I liked to uncork one from time to time, much to my coach's dismay. The metaphor isn't hard to grasp. One player describes it as a pitch you can get bored watching, even making you lose track of time. Much of the same applies to 'Eephus,' which drifts player to player, play to play, less as an ensemble piece than like a roving spectator. The guys, themselves, have no more than a handful of fans, including the diehard scorekeeper Fanny (Cliff Blake). Frederick Wiseman, the great documentarian whose films chronicle nothing so much as institutions kept alive over time, is the voice of the announcer. I earlier called Lund's film an ode, but it's not a sentimental movie. Time's passage, which no ballgame or perfectly thrown eephus can halt, grows increasingly disquieting as the afternoon light gives way to nightfall. That, to finish the game, they play into near-total darkness, with only headlights to see the ball, is a sign of desperation as much as it is commitment. After all, one guy in the dugout is listening to a radio broadcast of a ballgame, from 1972. What's being lost? It's not a strip mall the field is to be turned into but something harder to quibble with: a school. They could drive half an hour to another field, but that's said to be half Little League, half farmer's market. They aren't a collection of pals, either. They don't hang out away from the diamond. Things they don't talk about: work, families, politics. Things they do: eyecare for the ump. In the annals of baseball movies, 'Eephus' doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame with 'Bull Durham' or 'A League of Their Own.' The closest it gets to the big leagues is an appearance by Bill 'Spaceman' Lee, the 1970s southpaw and eephus adherent. But 'Eephus' is just as deserving of a place in that hardball pantheon, only in some minor ball realm, well below single A. Here, they don't throw 'high cheese' but such meatballs that, as one player riffs, you could call it pasta primavera. To call this a field of dreams would be pushing it. But it's a lovely way to pass some time. 'Eephus,' a Music Box release is not rated by the Motion Picture Association but contains coarse language. Running time: 98 minutes. Three stars out of four. Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
