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

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 Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
“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.”
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
'A symbol of the faceless corporate desire'
Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Say farewell to summer at these underrated US lakes
The Week Recommends Have one last blast
-
Truck drivers are questioning the Trump administration's English mandate
Talking Points Some have praised the rules, others are concerned they could lead to profiling
-
Twelfth Night or What You Will: a 'riotous' late-summer jamboree
The Week Recommends Robin Belfield's 'carnivalesque' new staging at Shakespeare's Globe is 'joyfully tongue-in-cheek'
-
Hostage: Netflix's 'fun, fast and brash potboiler'
The Week Recommends Suranne Jones is 'relentlessly defiant' as prime minister Abigail Dalton
-
Music reviews: Chance the Rapper, Cass McCombs, and Molly Tuttle
Feature "Star Line," "Interior Live Oak," and "So Long Little Miss Sunshine"
-
Film reviews: Eden and Honey Don't!
Feature Seekers of a new utopia spiral into savagery and a queer private eye prowls a high-desert town
-
Critics' choice: Three chefs fulfilling their ambitions
Feature Kwame Onwuachi's grand second act, Travis Lett makes a comeback, and Jeff Watson's new Korean restaurant
-
Book reviews: 'The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction—and a Search for Relief' and 'Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of "Born to Run"'
Feature The search for a headache cure and revisiting Springsteen's 'Born to Run' album on its 50th anniversary
-
Keith McNally's 6 favorite books that have ambitious characters
Feature The London-born restaurateur recommends works by Leo Tolstoy, John le Carré, and more
-
'Mankeeping': Why women are fed up
Feature Women no longer want to take on the full emotional and social needs of their partners