Film reviews: Eephus and The Day the Earth Blew Up

Small-town baseballers play their final game and Porky and Daffy return to the big screen

Still from 'Eephus,' directed by Carson Lund
Eephus is a “tiny but nearly perfect baseball movie”
(Image credit: Music Box Films)

Eephus

Directed by Carson Lund (not rated)

The Day the Earth Blew Up

Directed by Peter Browngardt (PG)

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“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.”

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