Eephus
Directed by Carson Lund (not rated)
This “tiny but nearly perfect baseball movie” is a bit like the trick pitch it’s named after, said Ty Burr in The Washington Post. “It may leave you bamboozled, happily wondering what the heck just happened.” On a dilapidated small-town New England diamond that’s about to be torn up to build a new school, two adult-league teams are duking it out one last time. That’s it for plot in this independent film, but Eephus emerges an instant baseball classic “because it understands what the game has meant and still means in small towns,” how it gives average people a way to gather, compete, and build the kinds of minor myths that sustain us. In many baseball movies, “the sport is just a part of some bigger drama off the field,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. But director and co-writer Carson Lund remains focused on this particular game. “He seemingly X-rays it to reveal a plethora of fine points and arcana that, once grasped, yield up the hidden meanings of infinitesimal gestures.” And because his appreciation of the competition’s human element extends well beyond the official action, “you’d need a radar gun to keep track of the movie’s zinging, often ribald dialogue.” You could never put Eephus in the same Hall of Fame where Bull Durham and A League of Their Own have been enshrined, said Jake Coyle in the Associated Press. Yet it’s “just as deserving of a place in that hardball pantheon, only in some minor-ball realm, well below single A.” Most of all, “it’s a lovely way to pass some time.”
The Day the Earth Blew Up
Directed by Peter Browngardt (PG)
“The Day the Earth Blew Up surprised me,” said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe. You, too, might expect the worst given Looney Tunes’ checkered big-movie history and that the brand’s first-ever fully animated, fully original feature was ditched by parent company Warner Bros. before being brought to theaters by an independent distributor. But this 91-minute feature starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig is “quick and loose like the old-school cartoons,” and “it’s pretty funny, too.” The magic begins with the movie’s “gloriously stupid plot,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. When a nefarious alien begins enslaving humanity with a chewing gum that turns people into zombies, only Daffy and Porky can save the day. It’s part of the devil-may-care fun that the gags “might not be the wittiest,” because when they come at us at rapid speed, “it all builds a lively head of comic steam.” When the final credits roll, “it really does feel like we’ve just watched a Looney Tunes short, not an actual feature.” But while “the style in which our heroes are depicted comes directly from the Looney Tunes of old,” said Glenn Kenny in The New York Times, the humor struck me as dishearteningly puerile. “The movie subjects Daffy Duck to a butt-crack joke, and compels him to twerk.” While the film has a hurtling energy, “anarchy has never been so mere as it is ultimately rendered here.”