Screening times:
Thursday, October 23, 6:30 PM
Sunday, October 26, 5:30 PM
Carson Lund | USA | 2024 | 98m
An eephus pitch (also spelled ephus) in baseball is a rare, very high-arcing off-speed pitch. The delivery from the pitcher has very low velocity and often catches the hitter off-guard. The corresponding slow velocity bears more resemblance to a slow-pitch softball delivery than to a traditional baseball pitch.
That’s a good description of this film, too. It’s a slow-moving, character-driven experience. Lovers of the culture of baseball will certainly appreciate it, but it’s not only for baseball fans. The film captures a certain charming, lazy summer day quality too. It offers a moment of nostalgia for a vanishing lifestyle, as an era of camaraderie and escapism fades in to an uncertain future.
The director says he wants the film to “exist in the great cinematic tradition of “hangout” films, celebrating the humanistic and experiential dimensions of the sport of baseball rather than the minutiae of the game itself.” Lund counts the cinematic influence of Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion and Howard Hawks’s Hatari! as well as non-narrative experimental films like those by Peter Hutton and James Benning.
“But most of all,” he says, “I’m inspired by the experiences I’ve had in the dugout and on the field over the years, in which I’ve been lucky to immerse myself in the kind of devoted oddball community that’s increasingly in short supply these days.”
“A sweet, sidewinding paradox of a sports movie: sentimental in a quietly unsentimental and offhandedly comic fashion.” - Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
“Eephus is an elegy, but with just the barest hint of sentimentality -- a shrugging send-off that simultaneously cares deeply about America’s pastime.” - David Sims, The Atlantic
“We come to Eephus expecting a metaphor for life and instead we are faced with life itself.” - Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture
Tickets $12 ($11.40 cash at the door if available)
