“We come expecting a metaphor for life and instead we are faced with life itself.” - New York Magazine
Eephus
“Baseball is the star, the game is the story, and the only conflicts that matter are the ones that the athletes resolve in play. Nonetheless, in Lund’s keenly discerning view, the game is inseparable from the human element.” - The New Yorker
Two recreational baseball teams, the River Dogs and Adler’s Paint, have been meeting on their New England field on Sunday afternoons for longer than anyone can remember. These middle-aged sportsmen can’t run as fast as they used to or connect as reliably with a pitch, but their vigorous appetite for socializing, squabbling, and busting chops remains undiminished.
After the know-nothing county board opts to raze the baseball diamond to make way for a school, the teams meet for one final game at their beloved Soldier’s Field, with girlfriends, kids, and local hooligans as intermittent spectators. As day turns to night and innings bleed together, the players face the uncertainty of a new era. Lovingly laid in a vanished Massachusetts of the mid-1990s, Carson Lund’s poignant feature debut plays like a lazy afternoon, perfectly attuned to the rhythms of America’s eternal pastime. Named for a rarely-deployed curveball, Eephus is both a ribald comedy for the baseball connoisseur and a movie for anyone who’s ever lamented their community slipping away.
SCREENING TIMES
Saturday, April 12 at 7:30pm
Genre: Narrative
Run Time: 98 min
Filmmakers: Carsun Lund
Language: English
Rating: Unrated
