Eephus (2024)

A Baseball Movie Masterpiece

In this episode, we dive into Carson Lund’s Eephus — a hauntingly funny and nostalgic baseball film that reflects on community, memory, and the death of American pastimes.

We talk about Omnes Films, the casting quirks of the players, and why the movie’s imperfections make it unforgettable. We also compare Eephus to some of the greatest baseball movies ever made, including Moneyball, The Sandlot, The Natural, Eight Men Out, Bad News Bears, and Field of Dreams. From Robert Redford’s timeless charm to Charlie Sheen’s wild fastball, we revisit the baseball cinema canon while asking: what does Eephus say about where movies, and American culture, are heading?

Along the way, we share stories of watching the film in theaters, the irreplaceable energy of collective moviegoing, and how nostalgia hits differently as you age.

Movies discussed: Eephus, Moneyball, The Sandlot, The Natural, Major League, Eight Men Out, Bad News Bears, Field of Dreams

Topics: baseball movies, Omnis Films, Carson Lund, cinema nostalgia, collective viewing experiences.

• Full Transcript

  Eephus (2024) — All Those Moments Podcast Transcript

  00:00

  How does a game played by nobodies in a has-been town on a field that won't even exist soon, where the winner doesn't matter at all, become one of the sweetest, weirdest, and in a way it's most accurate movies about baseball ever made? And although it takes place in the 90s, a fascinating commentary on life in 2025. I can't wait to answer that multi-part question. The movie is called Eephus. This podcast is called All Those Moments. I'm Benji Wade, and I'm Luke Baumgarten.

  tá.

  In time.

  Yes. Right, right. All those moments is a podcast that connects social, political, or cultural moments with moments from our favorite movies and television shows. Luke, did you grow up playing baseball? Watching baseball? What did you do? Girl, I grew up playing baseball. You're looking at a three-time Riverside Youth Sports All-Star catcher. Catcher. I was a catcher. You said something about being that.

  But functionally fitting your personality because you're an A D D person. Yeah. I didn't I could have been diagnosed just by how much I didn't like baseball until I started playing catcher. Yep. I had an appreciation of that position watching baseball growing up. And like I loved Pudge Rodríguez and I loved even Mike Piazza, but I never in a million years would have imagined myself liking playing that position because I think I'm the opposite. The idea of just like sitting behind home plate for that many innings just would sound like torture. What about you though? So

  It is the one sport that I never played growing up. I played probably everything except baseball. I did break my hand playing softball once. I don't know if that counts. Slow pitch softball is I was obsessed with the National League though growing up. My dad was a Cardinals fan. I was born in Georgia. So I thought growing up in Alaska, I'll just pick a team that I want to cheer for. I don't want to cheer for the same team as my dad. And at that time the Braves were horrible. It was when they had a guy named Dale Murphy.

  This is like mid to late 80s. It was before they signed all those incredible pitchers. I the thing about baseball that I've always been obsessed with that I think Eephus has so much to say about is all the intricacies, the routines, the small details. I can still remember being like 10 years old in the 86 World Series, watching the Mets beat the Red Sox. And of course, that has some relevance to this movie, Eephus we're gonna talk about. The curse of the Red Sox has a role to play. But

  Even players like Len Dykstra, before he became a complete psychopath, the way he he chewed sunflower seeds or the way that Eric Davis for the Cincinnati Reds wagg waggled his bat in this kind of unusual way. yeah. There's there's so much weird son of sort of superstition and it just ticks kind of that baseball players have. So you're talking about like Gary Sheffield had that really weird thing where he would just like point the bat

  Toward the pitcher, which I always thought must have been. Dude, Sheffield had the weirdest swing. I mean, you remember that stuff. You remember it, and you also must have imagine being a pitcher. I think I'd be intimidating if this like intimidators, this dude is just like pointing his bat at me before he takes a big rip. anyway, let's talk about Eephus. I am currently obsessed with this movie. I am embarrassed to say that I sat down, not even knowing what it was about. I thought it was going to be.

  A documentary about old dudes cosplaying their favorite vintage baseball players. It looked like the Society for Creative Anachronisms. It looks like LARPers. Yeah. Yeah. It looked like baseball LARPers because of the, by the way, the really cool art that they used to promote the movie. I thought did not think it was going to be scripted narrative. So Luke, tell me why you wanted to watch Eephus down at the Magic Lantern. It's kind of the same reason I wanted to do this whole podcast, not just this episode, the whole thing. I really realized in the last year.

  How much I think I mentioned this last episode. I miss the culture of third spaces we used to have: bars, coffee shops, movie theaters, parks, and municipal ball fields definitely play into this. It's like the way individual communities choose to encourage people to gather. Like those are in some ways the first third spaces. Experiences change when you experience them with other people. my God. Do they ever? It's the most obvious statement in the world, but I don't I personally had not really

  meditated on that in a really long time and I'd gotten into this rut I think I talked about last week. I love watching movies. I also love watching TV. I just binged a bunch last night, working my way through the the last season of the Bear. You know what my absolute favorite thing in the world is though?

  Watching a movie and then talking about it with other people right afterwards. Immediately after. I am so annoyed if I go with a group of people and they have to run off right afterwards. Like, I want to sit. I don't even have my thoughts formed at this point. My friends don't necessarily have their thoughts formed at this point. We're like growing out. It's almost physical. You have your like physical response, the things that get past your ability to even discern with intellect. One of my core memories is watching Braveheart. And then the guy that my sister was dating at the time was that way. He was like, Let's go to a coffee shop.

  And we went to a coffee shop. I swear to God, we talked about Braveheart for two hours. Yeah. Yeah. And if you have an opportunity to like go somewhere else, you're not just doing it in the vest, you in the in the foyer afterwards, you can do that. And it it's amazing how much time passes, how much joy there is in that. I don't I like forming my thoughts sort of in reaction to other people's thoughts. It helps me check my own sort of first impulses. And in that way, it's kind of like baseball too. It's a deeply personal team sport.

  at its best for me. And so you can do it alone. You can watch a movie on your couch. You can go to batting cages and let the robot toss you some balls, but it is not the same experience. It's not nearly as much fun. And it sucks to say, but this culture of solitude that we're talking about is winning in America. The disappearance of these opportunities to connect in real life is having real impacts on our society. And that's one of the main things that I'm the this whole project and why we wanna we're why we're always name checking our local theater. Cause like we want to

  Maybe rebuild a culture of movie going. The idea for this podcast existed, but the idea of watching Eephus and talking about it on this podcast had not even been in consideration. Again, I didn't even know the plot of it. I had no idea what it even about. So who did you invite down to watch the movie with us at the Magic Lantern? So this is the thing. I learned about this movie from a podcast I've listened to for almost a decade called Chapo Trap House. The the dudes who do that podcast helped produce the film.

  And I know you've listened to that podcast, but I don't think a lot of people in my day-to-day life are Grey Wolves, and it's a micro budget film. I don't even think this film has a rating. Like I had kind of forgotten this existed. And then my baseball dork friends, some friends from my like obligatory college basketball group chats, people I know from community organizing, there were a lot of different people talking about this film. And a handful of them happen to be middle-aged dudes still playing baseball with other middle-aged dudes, very much like the two teams in this movie.

  One of which is the hat you're wearing, Benji. These are the South Hill Turkeys. If we're if we're Shout out South Hill Turkeys, let's go. If we're treating neighborhoods like we treat cities in, you know, Major League Baseball, like this would be our home team. These are friends of ours. They play in the Inland Northwest Men's Baseball League alongside the other 45 plus teams, 45 age plus teams, Rangers, Freedom, Pirates, and Turkeys. So basically the idea was these dudes kind of wanted to watch the movie together. And

  07:07

  So I had this thought, like whether rather than watching it alone or even getting together in a house and doing a watch party, why not get our friends down at the Magic Lantern to see if they would host a closed screening and then just try to do that thing that I love doing so much? Spend 30 minutes talking about it right afterwards and then go home. Luke, before we get into the deep dive about all of our thoughts on this movie and all the moments from this movie, can you walk me through the kind of a plot of it? It's gonna take us one minute.

  Two beer league baseball teams, the River Dogs in blue and in red. Do they even have a name? The sponsored by Adler’s Paint, the Adler’s Painters. We have don't even learn the name of this other team, other than who sponsors them on the front of the jersey. Gather for one final game at Soldier’s Field, not the Soldier’s Field in Chicago, the random Soldier’s Field that like every small town is named Soldier’s Field because of people who returned from either World War One or World War II. It's just a small, nondescript New England town, and they're playing the last game.

  on this field. It takes place in the nineties. So there's no cell phones. There's a lot of AM radio or what I assume maybe FM radio. There's a lot of radio. And through radio, we learn this isn't just their last game of the season. It's the last ever game on this field. This field is going to get bulldozed. It's going to become a middle school. And I do think actually making it a middle school specifically is interesting. And one of the many reasons that we might want to talk to the filmmakers at some point 'cause I was like middle school, that means there's not going to be a baseball field on it for the high school kids to play at, probably. that's a good shout. Yeah. Yeah.

  And so the whole movie is just as one game. We see it almost in real time, day through to dusk, tonight. there are some young dudes, but it's mostly people who are our age and older, middle aged beer league regulars. There's a war veteran, there's an elderly scorekeeper who treats his role with quiet reverence. There are some stoner kids who come out of literally like a pier out of nowhere, don't even know the rules of baseball, but they decide to just hang out and make fun of these guys.

  There's basically zero stakes to the game itself, like I already said. The outcome could not be less important. The stakes are all about the loss of this field, the loss of the activities that take place on it, and the way that the act of gathering, even you know, by happenstance, like those stoner kids, creates these weird pockets of community that are ephemeral s in some ways, but also really important to like the way people gather and com in space together. The other thing that

  I think there is mostly the older dudes that are featured as kind of like the prominent I guess cast members or players on the teams. But there is this intergenerational thing where there are a couple of young studs on the team too. And at one point one of the characters is like mourning the fact that, that guy's got so much capability, but this is it. And he doesn't want to drive two towns over to the other baseball league, the other place where they can continue playing. Well, there's one guy who might be playing college ball, but it kind of sounds like he might be playing like community college ball.

  Yeah. So the movie's directed by Carson Lund. Is am I good to do this now? Yeah, go for it. Okay. Written by Carson Lund, Michael Basta, and Nate Fisher. It was shot by cinematographer Greg Tango, edited by Carson Lund. You notice Carson did a lot. He he had triple duty on this. Yeah, and so is micro budgets. Yeah. Exactly. So did his brother Eric, who did production design, art director. He probably handled props. He probably was Eric killed it. Carson Lund grew up in New Hampshire, studied filmmaking at Emerson College. He writes for Slant magazine, and he is from

  I tried not to do too much research on Carson Lund or even the film collective that he's part of called Omnes Films, because I really wanted to keep my perspectives on the movie fresh and not get influenced and biased by its authors. But he writes for Slant magazine. I did see that the last article that he had written for Slant was his glowing review of the release of Andre Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice, which was released on 4K Ultra HD. And if you don't know,

  There is a relationship between a film like Eephus and Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky, of course, the Goliath of Soviet cinema, one of the filmmakers who inspired certainly what's called the slow cinema movement. I'm gonna admit this is recent information to me. I never in all of my travels of being a person who loves films and loves filmmaking, I don't really get into generic definitions a lot. I have the same perspective toward music. You know, is it electro house or is it Detroit house? Like all that kind of stuff. I've

  It's all EDM to me, baby. It's all EDM to Luke, apparently. I never really do that, but Tarkovsky is definitely a part of like what inspired people that are interested in the slow slow cinema movement. Tarkovsky is the mirror movie that came out the year that I was born. ethos could definitely be labeled as slow cinema in a movement that's associated with themes of memory, loss, passage of time, decay. Lund himself has said that he wanted to make his own version of the Taiwanese movie called Goodbye Dragon In.

  Which is a a movie about a Taiwanese movie theater that's gonna have its closing. And the last movie that it it plays is called Dragon Inn. And then I did see a quote from Carson Lund, and I thought this is way too much synchronicity. He said, Baseball is dying, cinema is dying, let's do it on a baseball field and make an end of baseball movie. so take all that as backdrop for Omnes Films, which is a collective of filmmakers of which Carson Lund is a part.

  Omnes is Latin for all the people or everybody. And here is their mission statement, Luke, which I want to take your temperature on. Our mission is to fill a void in modern cinema. Our films are passionate, ambitious works made by friends that favor atmosphere over plot and study the many forms of cultural decay in the 21st century. Whatever the subject or genre, we seek projects that are original in conception and feel like they've never been made before.

  Whenever I think about atmosphere, and I do think about it frequently in film, I'm mostly thinking about the set and whatever. Atmosphere is also the people who end up in frame or who end up on the baseball field in real life. Like atmosphere is created not just by the built environment, but by the people who choose to then hang out there. Like that's the more important part, probably. And I didn't really think about it in that way. Like people gravitate to spaces for specific things, but it's the people that make the atmosphere. It's like

  They created this incredible setting. Yeah. They had a really finely tuned script. And when you combine those two things, I think you end up with a movie that's as good. If it's not obvious to our listeners and viewers by now, we're super into this movie. I mean, it feels totally true to me that this would fit into like a slow cinema movement. This is not a slow-paced film. Nothing really happens, but it's constantly there's cuts, there's so much dialogue. We're jumping around.

  There's you actually took the time to learn the names of some of the characters. It feels like there's 35 characters in this movie and we only learn the names of like seven of them. Yeah. But they s but I still came away feeling like certain people I knew something about their lives. These are well fleshed out characters. It's really funny. Yeah. Really funny. Let's talk about the structure of the moments. So that's how we're gonna do this podcast. And we're gonna talk about the moments in a fairly unique way on this particular episode.

  So tell me how we're gonna do the movie moments. This is only our second episode. We're still experimenting. What we thought was I actually recorded with our little wireless mics, shout out DJI, r basically recorded the conversation. and so we're gonna kind of tee up the the moments we're gonna talk about with little snippets from the crowd that was there. And so the first moment was when we got up, just that like you were saying, like

  I'm not thinking about the deeper cinematic aspects of this movie. The credits have just rolled. The Tom Waits song has just ended. We get up and like, what did you think? And I heard somebody in the crowd say, before I even had the the mic on, say it's like Sandlot for grown ups. Man. Any thoughts? I heard somebody say sandlot for grown ups. That's what my daughter said. It sounded like before it even started. And it turned out to be wonderfully true. How does that hit you? It

  It hits perfectly. I will say that I was probably the wrong age for the movie The Sandlot. The best job of my lifetime was working at Blockbuster Video when I was age 17 to 19, which is when Sandlot came out. In fact, I think the first week I started at Blockbuster Video, Anchorage, Alaska. Okay. Shout out. Sandlot was on the shelves. Yeah. So it was like think fall of ninety three is what I want to say. I'll have to check my mouth on that. But I would say it's like

  It's Linklater meets Terrence Malick meets Sandlot for grown-ups. If Jim Jarmusch directed it, that's kind of like if I did not know anything about Carson Lund and his predispositions as a filmmaker and I had seen this movie, those are the takeaways. Yeah, Sandlot, yeah, the romanticism for baseball, the the fantasy at like two points in life. Cause it's it's actually, you know, as young kids, you have this fantasy about growing up to be adults. This movie is sort of the opposite. You're you're sort of trying to reclaim the nostalgia you had.

  when your knees didn't ache at the, you know, by the second or third inning. and and trying to remember, pr almost trying to remember the romanticism you had for it as a kid. It's really beautiful in that way. You mentioned that it is slow cinema, but it never stops. And it's it's so briskly cut. I think the editing is meant to just keep you constantly propelled toward the next thing. Yeah. At any point, I think that

  16:06

  Carson Lund and the DP would linger on a shot of some atmosphere, whether it's clouds rolling past or it's this static shot of some a breeze hitting the trees. And one of my favorite characters, I'm just gonna get this out of the way right now that I'm obsessed with. The actor's name's Conner Marx. Okay. He plays a character called Cooper. And at one point the camera is it's pretty far away. It's like, you know, wide shot. There's some trees, and this character, Cooper, has a branch, and he's just like

  Winging it around at the tree makes almost no sense. It's almost like he's sword fighting, but the it's he's not it's like he's just whipping it around. Yeah. But he's like Don Quixote and he's fighting a tree instead of a windmill. It's really odd. But you'll have a moment like that, but it quickly goes into something else. You're constantly having your attention drawn to something else that's happening in or around the baseball field. And I really appreciate that about it. Another guy you liked was Franny. There's this moment where he starts randomly talking about ma the shapes of manhole covers. Dude.

  This was the first kind of very Jarmusch moment for me where in the movie theater I thought about this. So the character Franny, who plays the scorekeeper, he is the most lovable character in the movie. He made me cry when I watched it the second time because I was like, he's, you know, giving the Lou Gehrig speech and as the like last lights of the cars are leaving the baseball field and it's nighttime and then he walks into the woods. We're gonna talk about that more later. But that character Franny is talking about the way that

  their community had been using triangular shaped manhole covers, but they were all being replaced by round ones. And he like they cut to something else, I think, from the the food truck and then they cut back to Fran and he's just like fin he's not done. He's like still talking about the manhole manhole covers. The foundry made triangular manholes in the twenties. If you get your hands on one you could probably command a high bit at an auction. Some people say it reminds them of the recycling symbol. But every year they replace a few more of the circulars.

  Just another thing to write into the history books.

  It's just another thing to write into the history books. and I thought about a scene from Ghost Dog, Way of the Samurai. Yeah, it only took two episodes for me to reference a Jarmusch movie, one of my favorites, where the gangsters in the movie that had hired the Forrest Whitaker character. The samurai, yeah. Yeah. Another movie that's obsessed with details and has this kind of idiosyncratic dialogue, right? You know, the guy who had hired the ghost dog, the the Forrest Whitaker character is saying that he only communicates with pigeons.

  Did you say he contacts you through a fucking bird? Did I just hear you say that?

  What particular species of bird? It's a pigeon. Must be like a a carrier pigeon or whatever. Passenger pigeon! Passenger pigeon's been extinct since 1914. Am I fucking dreaming here or what? Passenger pigeon!

  That bird's been extinct since nineteen fourteen. It's again, it's a character who's kind of obsessed with history and things going extinct. And I just thought I thought of that even when we were watching the movie in the movie theater. It's like this is very Jim Jarmusch. So I'm not as nearly as like steeped in the oeuvre as you are, but I was thinking of a Jim Jarmusch movie throughout this as well, Coffee and Cigarettes, which is a movie similarly that just moves around a a cafe, a diner.

  Bill Murray's sitting at one table, but it's you know, it's just all these actors sort of playing out scenes from these characters' lives. the Rizza from the Wu-Tang clan is in it. And I think I actually it made me want to go back and rewatch that movie because I haven't watched it probably since I was in college to try to see like how it captures that same thing, just a slice of life in a place, in places that are disappearing now.

  RZA, by the way, also has the most scene stealing moment in Ghost Dog Way. The samurai. I can literally that's the only shot I remember from the movie is the shot of him meeting the RISA. It's a profile shot. Yeah. It might be a little tracking and they're walking toward each other and he's like walks up. I haven't seen the movie in a long time. He's like, Ghost Dog. Ghost Dog. Pow equality. I always see everything.

  And they hug and they they dap each other up in this like very specific way. And yeah, I know. And then RZA does the insanely dope soundtrack, by the way. All right, Luke, let's talk about the next movie moment from Eephus. So this one came from my buddy Matt Goldblum, who's one of the turkeys and actually had the like he had the whole fit on. He was wearing a turkey shirt. He was wearing the turkeys hat. He had a nice little, nice little jean jacket on top. He actually kind of looked like he walked out of the nineties in his thought, which was really, really funny and kind of fits with the self-deprecating nature of the movie.

  I understand the the artistic choice at the end, the anticlimactic walk-off face on balls, but I'm gonna be honest with you, that would have been the most exciting moment of the turkey season last year. So No, it was it was good. It was good. I just like that it was like you know, like there's not many spaces where a bunch of dudes can hang out. Yeah. and it's those are kinda lost spaces these days in this. And what I loved about that quote.

  was just it's so true. Like you like this is not good baseball we're watching on screen. And yet somehow it would have been like the high point of our friend's career. Cause at this age in our life, I don't think anybody thinks we're playing good baseball when you're in middle age, you know? Yeah. And I remember playing the last time I played adult an adult rec co ed soccer when I like shinned a goal in, I was I felt just ecstatic. I felt like Meradona at the time. I was like, that was so great in my

  Later on, of course, then I feel embarrassed. I'm like, Yeah, mine's I don't have it anymore. No, I mean I just I hurt I hurt everywhere right now. All right, Luke, let's talk about the next moment from Ethos. It feels like the guy like the scorekeeper would show up because it's a ritual and it's a place to show up and be a part of something. Yeah. And so I think there are fewer spaces like that. Like there's less Elks Club, Lions Club.

  church, you know, people don't do as much. That's what felt like part of the sadness for me is like baseball is is a ritual and it's a seasonal thing that like follows the the plants and the like the weather. You know, it's like it was getting cold, time's up, you know, and so that that felt like part of the sadness. I felt like it was such a cool metaphor for

  How baseball is something that, whether it's baseball or not, we hold on to things and when they finally are taken from us that it's lovely and it's heartbreaking and it's I didn't know how to feel at the end. Like I think I was sad and I was but it just seemed like baseball was this sort of metaphor that life is happening all around and baseball's just always there. Yeah.

  So Luke, when you hear that, how does the banter within the movie become a commentary on the banter that we experienced like afterward chatting with all the South Hill Turkeys and our friends with a group of adult league male baseball players in their 40s who were on the verge of weeping, thinking about what baseball has meant to their life? There really was the people were emotional at the end of this too. Like not only we we weren't just like thinking how funny it was and how silly we all are, sort of caring about this stuff at a certain phase of life, like people were emotional for it. And

  You know, so what I've been thinking about with the Third Spaces thing is there's a sociologist from the nineties who actually there's here's a name check of a recent documentary sort of reinforcing his work, but it's this dude named Robert Putnam who wrote a book. The book's called Bowling Alone. The idea is there at that point in the nineties, I'm sure this isn't true anymore, but at that point in the nineties, there were more people bowling than ever and fewer bowling leagues than ever. And he uses it to sort of ex ex express a a theory that.

  the civic decay that we were experiencing in the nineties. So flash forward and see how much worse it is now, was coming from the disappearance of these public spaces like Elk's clubs and, you know, the Shriners and the Masons and and also just, you know, bowling leagues and and baseball leagues. And so there's a movie on Netflix that's a tight, I think it's a 110 minute documentary, basically just updating Putnam and Putnam's in the film. It's called Join or Die. Just a really nice gloss of his theories of of this and then kind of

  How that's become supercharged in the social media era and you know, in in the world we're all living in. There's a moment I think the movie is aware of this context of the loss of third spaces and the fact that they're losing their baseball field. One of the characters says to another character at some point something about what they could do after the baseball field is gone. I live near Leda Lanes. Yeah, you can always go bowling. That's something. Always.

  24:52

  Our audience really, really connected to this because like part of what Putnam's thesis is is he's talking about the decay of civic life, but he's not talking about the loss of political spaces. He's not like worried about the Democratic or the Republican Party going away. He's worried about bowling leaks going away. And I think that's when we gather, we gather for a purpose, right? And and sometimes our relationships to people are completely built around that purpose. And so like why would

  A bunch of dudes who have only ever gathered to play baseball want to start bowling together or even go grab a beer afterwards, or you know, replace that with, you know, grabbing a beer at some point. They're just not interested. Well, and the movie is preoccupied with the idea that people still have opportunity to get together th for things that have absolutely nothing to do with politics, even though And then incidentally, maybe that's how you connect with people who are across the aisle from you in a way that you, I'm sorry, regardless of how

  bipartisan you try to be with your social media algorithm, you're gonna start seeing stuff that like pige like sort of funnels you into one camp or another, you know? Yeah. And the movie does after the scene where they talk about the bowling, there's a another scene at the very, very end where it's another kind of invitation from one of the players who's saying to one of the his teammates, you know, maybe we'll get together over the winter at a bar. Hey

  Do a meetup over the winter at a bar. You have everyone's contacts. Could be worth reaching out. Yeah. Think on it. Another piece that I think you've got a lot to talk about, but I think we both experienced is you can have an entire conversation and still under like track everything that's happening in the game. And there are very few games, maybe golf. You can watch this game and understand everything that happens and still have a completely tangential conversation with your friends, which is one of the reasons it feels like a

  Time in addition to being a game. Yeah. We made an incidental reference to this dynamic when we did the first podcast, which was about a movie, a soccer movie called The Damned United. Right. Where it was like basketball, yes, there are timeouts, but the moment that the ball's back in play, it's very difficult if you really care about what's happening on the court. Way too fast paced. With soccer, I made this observation when we did the screening. It's I think impossible because the clock keeps going. So

  Anybody who knows me and soccer is my favorite sport, when I go watch our local professional teams play, I am the worst conversationalist. You don't want to try to connect with me unless you're there to respond emotionally. I'm not even talking intellectually. I'm not there to talk about tactics and formation and the shape of the team. I'm there to be like, are they gonna win or lose? Because everything always feels like it's the highest possible stakes. Baseball has so much punctuation in it, and a lot of that punctuation.

  Are these long ellipses between moments? So I also got the sense from Carson Lund and these filmmakers that they weren't insufferable about the way that they built this production. They weren't worrying about every take and killing the joy when we talked about the spontaneity of all the characters. And yes, the dialogue was very specific, but I just had this detection that everybody that was part of the cast was really enjoying themselves.

  Whether it was improved or not, it had the the the vibe of those really smart movies that are partially scripted and partially improved, where it's like, let me just embody this character. And again, if there's like thirty characters, this might be a character that's built completely in an actor's head based on very few lines in the script, I would imagine. And so you just get to vibe. and so I again I don't know how improvised the script was, but it just felt like there were all these

  Yeah. We were just getting these weird personalities that had these quirks that felt really special. Like everybody really put time and thought into it. And everybody felt like they the way that the performances came across that they were encouraged to play around and to make weird choices that ended up making the cut. it's like it's a movie that we're gonna talk about our favorite baseball movies to end this podcast, but it doesn't have like the the purity of Field of Dreams and all of that like hopeful nostalgia that Field of Dreams was playing with. And it doesn't have all the, of course, the

  specificity in the science of money ball, but it has this irreverence and a ton of crass dick jokes and humor that, you know, very much, I don't know if your childhood is anything like mine, but it reminds me of being a teenager and probably even into my twenties and thirties, if I'm being totally honest. so many of the jokes don't land. And it feels completely intentional because when you're busting chops, yeah, you're gonna take risks. You're gonna try to say something like up the stakes and eventually you're gonna land one kind of reminded me of the the

  David Brent character from The Office. Eventually he tells a funny joke. there's a couple scenes where there are some jokes, one in particular that doesn't land, and he's one of my favorite characters. Do you remember the character Bobby? I think he's the owner of Adler's Paint. Okay, yeah, yeah. Early on, he tells a story about hurting his back, fixing his printer, and it plays so odd. It's the first moment where I'm just kind of like, that dude is going through some shit, you know? Fresh hot and ready. Sounds like your girlfriend, Kev.

  Sorry, Kev, you know I'm just screwing around. Just rude, Bobby. That's just rude. There's always like a dude in the group who like misunderstands how crass you're trying to be, or like, yeah, crass is one thing, but misogyny is like not cool with you, you know, the group that he's trying to be get in with. Like, there's always the a casual racist joke, you know? Wow, Jesus. Like, wow, yeah. We have to talk about the ethos pitch. I get yeah, we do.

  Although it's like it it is in some ways the perfect metaphor for the movie, it's actually kind of a the pitch itself is kind of a good metaphor for baseball, but like they actually take the time to explain it in the movie, so we can just let the let the movie itself explain what the pitch is. The Eephus pitch is a type of curveball that is pitched so unnaturally slow that it confuses the batter. He swings too early or too late. You lob it so it looks like a curveball, but you give it no power. Double if he can leg this out.

  The thing about this moment that I really enjoy is it's probably I don't know if you want to call it a rule, but it's like something that you don't often do where you call out the metaphor. There's a character in the movie. I like that. It's kinda like baseball. I'm looking around for something to happen and poof, game's over.

  Well, and it's like it's kind of like if you would have ended Moneyball by saying, That's how you play moneyball. That is the most exactly you know, tacky way to name a film. It is very boo doom doom kind of a moment. And I'm like, but again, I just think that character he feels like he's embodying the guy who's gonna say the quiet part loud of like Yeah, there's always the cornball who like sort of has to say the quiet part. I gotta be the s I gotta be the smart guy or the aloof d don't I'm not reading the moment. Like Derek's kind of like, yeah, duh. I just think I spelled out how an Eephus is like baseball, and you just gotta come out and say,

  It's kind of like baseball. Yeah, exactly. that actor was in a local TV show called Z Nation. And I am almost positive local meaning filmed in Spokane. Filmed in Spokane, Washington. I'm almost positive that I have seen that actor Conner Marx in Spokane before. He's way too memorable. Well, and that filmed in our office below fellow co-working. Yeah, I worked at the production company North by Northwest, where who was the production company involved in that. So I'm pretty sure I've seen Conner Marx around. He has a very memorable face. Yep. Luke, can you give me

  32:20

  a description of what happened in a screening that I did not appreciate at the time, but now I'm like, my God. One of the people who's one of the one of the actual former baseball players, Bill Spaceman Lee, used to throw a version of the e fus called the Leafus after Bill Lee. Bill Spaceman Lee's son lives in Spokane and plays for the Rapids. We actually tried to get him to come to the screening, imagine he doesn't know this either. We're like, dude, could we get him? But nobody had his contact information. So

  Yeah. We try we try to get the son to come because he lives here. Yeah. Why not come? And he's listed on the Inland Northwest Men's Baseball League as like their web media person because he's like a designer and a photographer. and I added him on Facebook. I'm trying to get a hold of this guy because it seems like way too again synchronicity. Yeah. So it it's at this point that Bill Spaceman Lee just kind of appears out of nowhere and he's clearly like trying to get the k the baseball players in the movie to invite him to to play, right? Yeah. So

  A quick history about Bill Spaceman Lee. Lee did play professional baseball for a long time. He had a pretty damn good career for the Red Sox. He finished his career with a three point six two ERA and was named to an American League All-Star team in nineteen seventy three. And he did have a moment in the nineteen seventy five World Series where he hung one of his leafest pitches to the Cincinnati Reds, Tony Perez, who

  Waiting for that one. That one is gone over everything. Perez timed that blooper pitch and slammed it over to screen out in the lands downstreet. And now we have another one run ball game in this World Series. They lost both of the games that he started in the nineteen seventy five World Series. However, he did leave both those games with a lead.

  The New England baseball kind of history and lore. Of course, the Red Sox and stuff. Yeah, it was very much in play in this movie. So I I couldn't help but compare that to the history. I was even when we were watching the movie, I admittedly had never really heard of an Evis. I don't think that's something I just I hadn't either. I knew Knuckleballers, of course. Yeah, right. And a very famous knuckleballer who played for the Red Sox, Tim Wakefield. Wakefield hung a knuckleball that Aaron Boone hit into the moon in the two thousand three American League Championship series, even though Red Sox came back to win two World Series after that.

  So Wakefield won two World Series before he died from cancer in 2023. Bill Spaceman Lee went on to pitch in a huge assortment of leagues. And even when he was 63 years old, he pitched five and a third innings for the Brockton Rocks in 2010, earned a win, making him the oldest pitcher to ever win in, or sorry, to ever appear in or win a professional baseball game. That's wild. And he has this great moment where he's trying to convince the these players to let him

  Take a shot at it, even though at the time of filming he was like in his early 70s. Yeah. Well, when I was younger, I didn't throw that hard. Now I'm older, I don't throw much harder. But I got good shit. I'll get you three outs. So we've already hinted at the next moment. but the the crowd picked up on this too. You know, so many of those awesome movies we love, like Goonies and stuff from the 80s and 90s, it was about kids or this or, you know, like this group of like this rag tag group of people trying to stop.

  kind of encroaching modernity usually in this sense of like, they're gonna pave this over and build a mall or something. Or it's like think of the developers from the Goonies, like everybody the neighborhood's gonna go away entirely because we have to go find the rich stuff in order to stop our our all of our houses from being foreclosed on. This is not that. This is the town building a new school for the betterment of everyone, a public school, you know? Our crowd caught onto that. And I thought that was a it's a really important part of the film. It's like this is just time.

  It's not there's there's no bad guys in this movie. It's just the passage of time changing com like part of community as you get really used to it and you don't want it to go away, even if the change is good. But Benji, for you, it brought up a very specific filmmaker that I want you to talk about because he's really important to you. And I had literally never heard of this man before. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's real film nerd shit. I will admit that the first 10 minutes of sitting down to watch the movie, as I mentioned, I didn't realize it was a scripted narrative, but the first

  Credit that just made me go. I didn't recognize any of the names, but I see narrated by Frederick Wiseman. And I'm thinking to myself immediately, it must be just super random like coincidence. There's no way that this is the Frederick Wiseman. But then I'm listening to the narration and it's like, okay, that sounds like a really old guy. Yeah. Turns out it is the Frederick Wiseman. So why did you put a the the way people do the Ohio State University in front of Frederick Wiseman, a man I had never heard of before this film? Okay. So

  To get a sense of Wiseman's importance, not just to this movie, but like the entire history of movies, I'm gonna give you a really quick journey that'll go from the French New Wave to Wiseman in the United States in just a few sentences. Let's go back to the 1960s. A bunch of French filmmakers are running around with these lightweight cameras that are made by a company called Eclair. You're thinking Truffaut, Godard, the New Wave movement, a filmmaker named Jean Rouch within the cinema verite nonfiction film movement. And it inspired a lot of American filmmakers.

  Including Frederick Wiseman. He picked up a sixteen millimeter version of the Eclair camera. All the like sync sound recording equipment got much lighter. So what happened was all these guys were suddenly you weren't locked into studio production. You could actually carry go out in real life and make a documentary. Yep. 35 millimeter cameras, sixteen millimeter cameras. Of course, we know that the Vietnam War was televised. And he ends up making a bunch of what are called in the US direct cinema.

  To be clear, Wiseman didn't really like either one of those terms. He didn't want to be associated with cinema verite or direct cinema. He called his films reality fictions, effectively fly on the wall, sink sound. No at this point, nonfiction documentary films are all voice of God. It would be, you know, the interviewer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Omnes films are interested in the many forms of like cultural decay of the 21st century. Well, Wiseman and

  The Maysles brothers are also heavily associated with this movement. Wiseman himself was really like preoccupied with the bureaucratic institutions, both and both the like banality and complexity of American life as depicted in these institutions. Speaking of institutions, the first movie that he ever made was called Titicut Follies. It was about a Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane. And then he followed that up a year later with high school, which was about a public high school in Philadelphia.

  And he also, I found out, is 95 years old and made a documentary in 2020 at age ninety called City Hall, which is about government operations in Boston and it's like four and a half hours long. the thing about Wiseman, and I think why he wanted to call his movies what was it? Something fiction reality fictions instead of cinema verity or whatever is he didn't buy into the the pretense the pretense and the bullshit that he was somehow telling the truth, the big capital T truth. He's like, No, when I go to a high school in nineteen sixty eight.

  And walking around with a camera. I'm walking around with camera. Everybody reacts differently. Yeah, obviously. I'm choosing to put my camera in a certain place, and I'm very much choosing to edit, edit this movie. And I want to tell a narrative story. He was he did not shy away from wanting to tell narrative stories with his his his documentaries. High school is like this funny but very bleak view of high school life in 1968. Of course, you know, we're in the middle of Vietnam, civil rights movement.

  The teachers are shown as being not prepared whatsoever with what's happening outside the country. They're kind of controlling, they're kind of mean. They look like like assembly line workers treating kids like parts that they're building a car with. Yeah, it sounds like from hearing you talk about it, it sounds like there's there's always a generational difference between teachers and the kids they're teaching. But in this case, it's like there's this real cultural transformation too. So teachers that grew up with the sort of respectability politics of the fifties probably.

  Are now trying to teach these kids who are like, Y'all are sending me to war, you're there's a draft on, like there's all this racial unrest, there's this whole civil rights movement. Like so during the filming of high school, the Mili massacre occurred, like literally while they were filming. Yeah. And then a month after they finished production, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Wild. The character of Howie in the movie Eephus is the age of what those teachers would have been like. Interesting. The so I guess if you call it the Great Generation or the Silent Generation, somewhere in that range.

  40:31

  I think what's fascinating to me is watching high school, and yes, it's entertaining. It's like watching all the ingredients come together for how to make a boomer. Like these students are all boomers. And if you play with a timeline of these guys that are in their forties in the at the which is the same age of the South Hill Turkeys that showed up to watch Eephus with us, but the characters in Eephus are the age of their boomers. They're guys that would have been 18 in 1968. Yeah.

  The great movie reviewer AA Dowd from A V Club had this to say about high school, with a which I think wraps it up pretty good. High school gradually morphs into a quiet depiction of clashing generational values with the instructors as torchbearers for a general worldview on the wane, and the students as the voices of a new country being born in their image. So this moment I want to play from our movie to to tee this up is when Howie's watching the game and and he just decides to talk about what it what he thinks about the fact that they're

  Building a school. What do they need a school for? I mean, you know to learn I guess, but kids learn on the job. I mean they don't need a school, you know, practical day in and day out kind of thing. Flipping burgers. Cooking hot dogs at hot dog stands.

  I hate this goddamn business. And you get to see like what what does it look like when a boomer was in the lab being created? they were graduating high school in the sixties and thirty years later they found themselves, you know, really uneasy about soccer and hating the idea of a school replacing the baseball field where they play. Here's just one big backyard. My backyard. So fucking Ram builds that school.

  Then this dugout becomes a auckless fucking easel. Well, and that's the thing that's like got me a little bit in a mood about this third space thing that I'm thinking about so much. It's like things are going to change. I don't I wouldn't have any more power than anybody on that field does about whether this field goes away or not. And I guess the question is, if okay, so if that baseball and we've already discussed later in or you they've already discussed l earlier in the film that like

  Nobody's gonna drive two towns over to go use a different baseball field. This is just gonna stop existing, right? It's just that's the reality. So if these things are gonna go away and there is this like natural attrition of cultural space or or a natural transformation of of civic space. It feels kind of like a parable for what happens when we lose shared histories with one another. And I love that about what Carson Lund is doing by casting Frederick Wiseman as the narrator, by including the actual Bill Spaceman Lee. It's like

  We don't remember anymore what happened ten years ago. Yeah. Let alone what happened in the nineteen sixties or what Bill fucking Spaceman Lee did in the nineteen seventy five World Series. But Carson Lund picked Wiseman, picked Lee for a reason and not just for like interesting filmmaker credibility. Yeah. It's I think about this movie, I just want say this. It's like it's tonally nostalgic and hopeful, but it's like also very earnest. The radio host, even the ads on the radio show, the players, the umpires, the narrator, the billboards on the outfield walls.

  It's all local and it's all in like intimate conversation with the community. So you don't see any national ads. I don't think there's a one reference to any like Budweiser or Isn't there something like about a barking dog's gonna scare your kids at Halloween? Like it's like that level of like civic journalism or something where it's like watch out for it starts with a a a warning by the narrator that there's a coyote on the loose or something. It's got this red team versus blue team thing, but nobody wants to rip one another's throats out.

  Right. Yeah. And they don't buy into in this this fictional setting the both sides false dichotomies that we're all gagging on every day. The tension between people on opposite sides of this whole red versus blue situation in contemporary culture, right? Is the response to that is to like block each other on Facebook. It's like I had this in this movie doesn't seem to have like an especial especially cynical view about boomers and wants to kind of like place smelling salts under their noses. Like, remember what

  This generation was like before they were red pilled and became like Fox devourers, Fox News devourers. Local friend had some disagreements, let's just say, politically. At one point, we decided we're gonna go down, we're gonna have some whiskey, and we're just gonna shoot the shit. Yeah. And we did. And it was awesome. I didn't agree with a single thing that this dude believed about politics local or national. Yeah. He didn't believe in anything that I believed in. But you know what we did? We drank whiskeys and we laughed and we said some funny things to each other. And at the end of the day, was like, dude, it's good to see you. Yeah.

  He blocked me six months later on Facebook. Right. And said that and like did not block you after you guys got whiskey together. No, exactly. And never would have blocked me as a result of having whiskey together. But if we had continued our interactions in person, breaking bread, going to a fucking baseball game, yeah, he never would have thought, I'm gonna say some trollish shit and then I'm gonna block him on Facebook. To me, those two teams were obviously red and blue because the rest of the uniform was white, and that's like just like baseball is America.

  And and I'm not like advocating for nationalism here, but like our our national identity is tied up in those two colors, right? And and that used to be a unifying thing about America, right? Again, not a big fan of nationalism. I'll just come out and say it. But like that is one of the galvanizing things about what makes us all American is our Americanness. And now, you know, political parties have chosen to sort of be like, okay, we're the red team and you're we're the blue team. What you're reflecting on is how much more partisan.

  even colors have gotten since the time of this movie, actually. It's mostly like, you know, demagogues that I'm referring to in this observation, but I'll just say this. I don't care who it is, if it's a national personality with millions of listeners, followers, subscribers, whatever it is, the death of the third space in American life right now is because those people, I don't care if it's Joe Rogan or Hassan Piker, they're not going to go to a baseball game with you. But you know who will? Your neighbor.

  Those people will go to a baseball game with you. Yeah. And you should probably ask them to go. It's funny because, you know, the people talk about like how unhealthy parasocial quote unquote relationships are with like your favorite podcaster or whatever. Or I've never really believed that just like really liking listening to a podcast is a bad thing, right? The that's not the part of the parasocial the parasociality that is a problem. It's when like that becomes your entire social world is one way traffic from a streamer or from an influencer or from a podcaster.

  when you mistake the the non friendship, the parasocial relationship you have with somebody you're never gonna meet who lives, you know, a thousand miles away as being the same as going and grabbing a beer with your neighbor, right? Let's pull it back to the movie. Yeah. There was a moment when one of the people responding to the movie had an observation and a realization, I'd said I should say, about what was really happening within the time frame of this movie.

  We were thirty minutes into the movie and I leaned over to Luke and was like, I just realized this whole movie's gonna be about this one baseball one. But and the passage of time is the clock timing.

  And the belly versus this pin. And then and then the light changing through the whole thing. And so that also it was just like by the time it was by the time I realized they were gonna go to dark, I was like, my god. This is like a real baseball game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were gonna keep playing in the dark, yeah. The movie takes place in a during a game, which and it's like the I do think they mention the radio mentions Halloween, so it's like late in the season. This is the end of summer.

  Which means the shadows are getting longer. So for a filmmaker from a technical perspective, this had to be and a micro budget film. Yeah. How do you even make this film happen because the passage of time is a literal literal character? I think they also filmed it like during this time period. If it wasn't in the fall, then it had to have been spring because there were minimal continuity goofs that I picked up on watching it the second time, but it would have been mostly like being able to see a a the

  48:45

  People talking to each other. You could see their breath. But then where it gets tricky is the stuff that they shot at magic hour or dusk. And that stuff is stunning. It's some of my favorite footage and and cause it becomes very difficult to shoot because you have a limited amount of time. This is what made Terrence Malick very famous. Days of Heaven, his his amazing movie from the 1970s, he filmed almost entirely during Magic Hour, which is like

  Yeah, you have to be like nimble forty five minutes ready to go. And some of the best moments from Eephus are shot during Magic Hour. Taking all this care to make this continuity work, make time a character in the in the immediate aspect of the game, but then as a metaphor for, you know, the times in America changing, times in this town changing, it really pays off in the metaphor of the movie and the audience picked up on that. There were just all these really stark juxtapositions that created all this tension.

  It was like there's a light and darkness and there's noise and silence. There's the old guys and young guys, the nice guys, the angry guys. And it all kinda like sorta kinda came together at the end. But also there was like this weird tension of like order and chaos with like

  The game and the field and the rules and then outside of it, there's all this noise and the lights and the leaves changing everything. So here's another technical thing, Benji, like sound design, stuff like that. There's some really interesting choices they make. When people are sort of like, okay, th there's a game happening, the outside world, the noise, the food truck guy, the bells from the church. I tend to be bad at this. And so I was so

  appreciative of this observation. I tend to forget how exceptional the sound design and what a character the sound plays in the the storytelling. And there's in in particular one moment where the character who has mentioned earlier in the movie that everything is a war. You know, I think it's it's it's it's like going to the grocery store. It's a war. Yeah. Yeah.

  That same character then ends up in the woods and this observation from the person at our screening is just Just like looking for a baseball, right? Looking for a baseball and he starts to hear, and it's I think it's being conveyed or implied that he was like a Vietnam war vet, because he starts to hear choppers that he's looking around and he s he finally sees the kid smoking a cigarette. I just about lost it. It's one of the funniest moments. Yeah. So y basically he's like having a flashback. So probably some PTSD, which, you know, no laughing matter, but it leads to this really funny scene where he's

  Feels like you must be, you know, back as the sh back in the shit as they used to say in Vietnam. When I think of helicopters, I think of Vietnam. Like that was the the helicopter war. Yeah, it's very Apocalypse Now, yeah. Apocalypse now, Platoon, all those movies, like you know, those are that's how you got in and out of those jungles. They they I think they stopped just short of like playing a Ride of the Valkyries or whatever. But yeah, yeah, or like yeah, like having one of the one of the characters at the very end go the horror. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

  And then what's cool is the moment they're back on the baseball field, it does just get super quiet. Quiet stuff. Where you can hear every single thing. There's a moment where the guy's like standing in the outfield for the longest time. I don't even know the intention behind the scene, but he's just kind of mumbling to himself. And it's so quiet that you can almost hear his inner thoughts. I the other thing I really like about this interaction of the generations is the depiction of these the skateboarder, like young teenage kids that are totally bored is that.

  You know, I was 17 at the time that this movie depicts, I would have gotten high and watched adult men play baseball for 30 minutes or an hour just to kill time, right? Yep. So, you know, the other night, my wife and I go to Comstock Park here in Spokane. It's open swim night and it's beautiful. It's eighty eighty degrees. It's like you can't come up with a more perfect evening. It was only parents and little kids who don't yet have smartphones. Yeah. No teenagers. Really, really a bummer. And it feels like

  something that this movie has something to say about is, you know, teenagers would have an idle moment when they were in, you know, in 1993 or 95 or whatever this is supposed to be. Yeah. Now they'd be like, I'm just I'd rather just be like hanging out on on our phones. This is so like get off my lawn shit. But but also it's like so the like I'm not going to stop using social media anytime soon. But I think it's would behoove us all to realize like what it's good for and what it's not good for. And one of the things that I think even when we do go out with our friends,

  It takes a month to like text back and forth, like get the actual day that's gonna work because our lives are so hyper scheduled. And every generation's lost in this sauce, by the way. This is not just young people. I would love to pick on the teenagers, but the truth is there's a bunch of adults. I think it's actually maybe worse for adults. Because like life gets in the way. we're so busy. I gotta go to work the next morning. I got all these responsibilities. Yeah, we have responsibilities. And those responsibilities, I think, are destroying novelty in the same way that I think, you know, the hyper algorithmization of

  Digital life destroys novelty as well. I started a podcast about local professional soccer. I started this podcast with you where we want to watch movies at the Magic Lantern and then talk about it. And yeah, we might be speaking to an audience outside of Spokane. And I hope we are. But ultimately, we want to go down to the Magic Lantern. And I also want to hear perspectives from people that aren't just like, you know, content creator class, because that's super annoying. And I think there's too much of that. So one of the things you've encouraged me to do through this podcast is to go invite perspectives and and

  These things that people said when we went to the magic lantern was unbelievable. Yeah. So the project of the my soccer podcast and this podcast is that, you know, basically every time we feel anxious or distressed or bored, we pick up a phone and it's like, no, actually, maybe don't. Maybe live in the discomfort. Maybe watch the world around you. Live in the discomfort. Go down to your local stadium or your local wherever and watch some sports. Then of course we should say

  another person who sort of came in with a high heat right at the end, like a closer, a really talented closer, your wife Ray. As a therap therapist, and of course the light and dark, as one as a good therapist would, reminded her of death and change. I loved your thought. That was I thought about that too, like the dark and shining light into the darkness and the end of things, and it felt like at the end it was like this is a movie about death. It was like lights flicker out.

  Ever yeah, but but everybody had their own someone had to light off fireworks, someone disappeared into the cornfield. It was just like this is everyone's relationship to death, and it's okay. It's all all how we relate to ending. So there's a speech at the end, Benji, I want you to talk about because I didn't realize this was a an actual Lou Gehrig speech, but everybody else in the room seemed to. So tell me about Franny given the last lines at the end of the movie. The ending of this movie is breathtaking and stunning and also deeply

  melancholic. Yeah. God. It's weird to like laughing in a movie. And then at the end you're like a little sad. Oof. That's what makes it so much more powerful and what actually makes the joy a little greater, I think, is like it's really sells. Like, God, this was so much fun. And now we know it's over. So we know it's over. And it's a it's a beautiful sucker punch, this final gesture of

  From Carson Lund and these filmmakers. So the character Franny, who is a guy that you literally just want to reach through the screen and squeeze because he's so cuddly and he's so charming and he's so warm and he's just like a everybody knows somebody like that. Yeah. And he's losing this tradition. Yeah. And you know, but the because the final moments of this film that it might be the actual end. So Carson Lund talked about filming a movie about the death of movies, the the death of baseball and

  This last moment is he gives this kind of the last lines of Lou Gehrig's famous Yankee Stadium speech.

  56:31

  Consider myself.

  Face of the earth.

  And then Franny walks into the woods like shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams, and you kind of know that was his death. Yeah. And it it's just dude, I can't even really talk about it. I watched it this morning. And then I just to be to go back to like how much you can only really sell that ending if you've just spent the first or the, you know, the previous however many hours enjoying the company of these people. Yeah. You you get brought into it's like wow, we were

  We were sitting in a theater watching this, it's almost like that theater was were would have been the stands, you know, on the third baseline. Like we could have been there. You know, it reminds me of a lot of growing up in a rural space, but more than that, it made me feel like I knew this town and these people. man, I wish I'd have just gone ex I then I watched it. Yeah. And I'm watching it the second time. I'm like, I just want this to keep going. My my kid, my eleven year old is also with me.

  And she thought that a grown man peeing on a fence at night made her think it was becoming a horror movie. And I have to say, fair enough to my kid, seeing a grown man peeing outside at night is the stuff of nightmares for most kids. Yep. I have one more thing I just want to say about the topic of death. This podcast, before I had seen Eephus, was going to be a podcast about the best ever death soliloquy in the movie Blade Runner. It's part of our intro. And it's because we're also thinking about the movie industry.

  But I just want to clarify, not movies, okay, not cinema, the movie industry, movies like this one or the animated film flow that I saw last Christmas, and me and my entire family cried when we watched it. they show us that we can avoid getting devoured whole by the AI-built focus grouped hellscape that's on the horizon of movies at the industry level. But don't give up on cinema. Don't give up on being in public shared spaces with your neighbors and your community.

  Ignore the myth that's being peddled everywhere that we only have enmity for one another because of what's happening on social media. Ask your neighbor to go watch a movie. People have been talking about the death of journalism literally since I my first year in journalism. The first big layoffs hit Spokane after I had been on the job for less than a year. I was thinking about this this morning. There are no more Tower Records anymore because people don't buy physical media, but that doesn't mean there isn't there aren't like we've got like three or four boutique record stores in Spokane. So

  Maybe there is no more and it and this is tough for film because film is preposterously expensive to make. So it's not the same as like, I can just cut my own little record or I can, you know, go, you know, buy some buy some paints in an easel and and become a painter. there is a sort of econom an economy of scale or like you know, it's the comes into filmmaking. And it's very costly. But, you know, as technology gets better, maybe the

  the communal aspect is going to become more and more important if the money isn't there, then it's going to become about the love. I just want to really quickly shout out Will Menaker, Amber Frost, the Chapo Trap House people, whoever funds things like Omnes Films productions, you deserve gratitude. Yeah. Because it is expensive. Even Eephus was expensive. They used a Sony, Cine Alta, Zeiss Master Anamorphic lenses. Like this is beautiful, beautiful stuff. Yeah. And it wasn't cheap to make.

  Yeah. wait, I forgot to give you you forgot to give your note about the actors that played the baseball players related to the the budget and whatever else of like the skill level of the baseball players. I heard I'm not gonna I'm probably gonna butcher this story, but Carson Lund said something on a podcast that I heard of him talking about how the he kind of thought that this might be a higher quality of baseball originally. Like we might get some people who could actually play.

  And I think because they might have casted, I think they casted digitally, like or like remotely, he was finding these people who were like really good for the characters he was imagining. And then he'd be like, So you can play baseball, right? good at baseball? I can totally play baseball. And in some ways, like that's the whole movie. So it's it forces you to sort of take what you got and kind of change what's in your mental, you know, your mental picture of whatever you're doing to match the team you have around you, which is really what coaches do too in sports. I couldn't imagine

  this movie if it would have been with like, you know, even single A professional players. I'm I'm so glad it wasn't. Yeah. Even down to the level of I would never nitpick this movie, but I'm just gonna laugh at one moment. The character Derek is watching, I think it's the Ed Mortanian character that's played by an actor in his sixties. Okay. Yeah. And he's saying something to the effect of, well, he can only throw 75 now and, you know, he used to be able to throw 78 or something like that. Right. And I was like

  This dude looks like he's throwing 37 miles an hour, nowhere near 70. And meanwhile, I love the part with the skater kids. And the one of the kids says, I've been watching this for an hour and I still have no idea how baseball works. Yeah. And then the other kid also says, he's watching the character Troy, who I think may have been in fairness, may have been drunk at this time, but it speaks to what you're saying about the cast. looks perfect, but clearly cannot do anything. He's a very unconvincing athlete. Yeah. And he goes to he says, I think this guy's the best player.

  And he swings and he falls down. Probably drunk, but it's one of the many. There's like the these scenes are countless. Yeah. There's so many funny moments. All right, let's wrap this up as far as the the movie itself goes. Adler's paint wins six to five on a walk-off base on balls. So for me watching this, it wasn't quite I've seen some walk-off based on balls. It wasn't quite as dramatic as my beloved Braves and Andrew Jones clinching the pennant for the Braves in 1999 against the Mets or Jim Layritz for the Yankees.

  beating the Mariners in the 15th inning of their American League division series in nineteen ninety-five, but that's how the movie ends. I think it's it's it's perfection. Yeah. Yeah. Jake Coyle of the Associated Press calls Eephus the best baseball movie since Moneyball. Of course. How could you disagree? No, of course not. I want to use that to segue into talking about our top five baseball movies. Look, you ready to do it? Yep. All right. Let's do our top five. Yeah. I will go first. Go for it.

  And it's Moneyball. Yeah. So is that your number one or is that just the first of five? I think it's the first of five and it's my number one. I think this movie is perfectly constructed. It's Bennett Miller's best movie. I think Capote's probably right there. Yeah. It's Steven Steven Zallian and Aaron Sorkin working together on a script. And, you know, whatever you want to say about either of them, they're fantastic screenwriters. I think Moneyball is like a movie that I'll watch once a year. Yeah.

  I haven't I definitely don't watch it once a year, but it's it's I don't think I have my list as ordered, but I think it's in my top five. so you have you have Moneyball. Yeah, Moneyball's in there. Number two for me, and this is weird. So this is these are mostly movies that I watched as a kid, except for Moneyball. Okay. I think Sandlot, man. Yeah. I haven't dude, I don't even know if I've seen it. It's it's just one of those, it it's like the Goonies for me. My kids love it. It's about baseball, but it's about the adventure. You know, there's a dog, like a huge dog. Yeah.

  01:03:37

  Yeah, it's just there's a just so much nostalgia there. And it it ties into the the fantasy aspect of things. It's like not only do we all think we're gonna be in the major leagues, we also might think that beyond the I think it's the right field fence is, you know, a dog that might as well be a dragon. You know? number two for me would be the natural. between Randy Newman's soundtrack, which is just amazing. the Newman brothers is many of them. There's a David, there's a Thomas, they're all

  Thomas is probably the goat. Thomas is the well, I mean, no, Ran I mean, Ran from like a popular music standpoint, I Randy's. Yeah, but I don't get into all those weird songs that he does. Yeah. Yeah. Well, but also didn't even do I love LA like Randy Newman. Yeah, a little corny. But he also was like the in terms of original songwriting, like all the pics are like Toy Story. That was yeah. Robert Redford for being so unforgivably handsome and charming, that I actually forgive him for being forty seven years old when they filmed The Natural.

  playing the role of a character even when he was 18. It's it even when I was a kid, I was like, this is a little weird, but he's just so charming and beautiful that i I forgave him. All right, give me your number two. Again, it's like another I saw this one late. So actually, no what I'm gonna start with this. Cause this was me imagining what it would be like in my grandparents' basement. Grew up in a relatively conservative household, but then when I went to my grandma's house, all bets were off, including watching movies as a child, like major leaks. man. Where

  Whatever else happens with Charlie Sheen's ability to control his fastball, what I was really paying attention and and maybe there are some tough and I've not rewatched this movie. So whatever the racial politics were around the the Caribbean player who is like Joe Boo and Joe Boo's rum and the Joe Boo. I've seen that movie at least a thousand times. I'm not including it for r reasons because I just don't think it gets over my other ones. I think when it comes to baseball, I I just play it little bit down the middle. But

  My next one would be Eight Men Out. It's my favorite John Sales movie, one of my favorite John Cusack movies. Extremely elegant interpretation of the Black Sox scandal. Makes your heart break for characters like Buck Weaver played by Cusack, Shoeless Joe Jackson played by D. Sweeney. I shout out to D. Sweeney. Shout out to the actors of a certain age of the nineties. Like that's I haven't seen that movie in a million years. I remember liking it. And I remember, yeah, like a world where Cusack and D B Sweeney are in movies is a is a world I want to remember. Exactly. What's your third one?

  yeah, so this is I actually saw this a little bit later, but Bad News Bears, man. And that that was way before my time. But that I remember really loving that movie. That's math out, right? Yeah. Yeah. I haven't seen it, I don't think. That's weird, but I haven't seen the remake either. Neither have I. And then I think what, both of our f number fives? is Field of Dreams your next one? I actually d no. I I I like Field of Dreams. It's always felt a little So we're on four for me. you're four. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've done four. So

  Yeah. So I've done my so you're you we're on your fourth. Yeah, yeah. Go for it. So what's your fourth? So speaking of shoeless Joe Jackson, he was then played by Ray Leota as a far more soulful smoke show version of Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams. great one two punch with eight men out. If you want to watch those movies back to back, I think it'd be pretty rewarding. Yeah. It's a movie that's like super corny and it's built but it's built, I think, on a premise that is so undeniably fun.

  Yeah. Even as a grown man, I'm just like the idea of building a baseball field and a bunch of ghosts from the past. Come on. It's it's incredible. It's funny. So I think you you might have been too old f to appreciate Sandlot at that time in your life. I think when I first watched Field of Dreams, I was pretty young and I was like, this is just like old man nostalgia. yeah, could you try to get You had a Timothy Busfield kink. You thought if Timothy Busfield's in this and from 30 something, this must be a shit movie. Exactly. Yeah. It's made for my parents. I'm not watching this. one of the true

  I I think in Field Drinks, one of the truly great James Horner soundtracks alongside his soundtrack for Edward Zwick's Glory. Another amazing Phil Alden Robinson movie, Sneakers, also has a soundtrack by James Horner and Branford Marcellus, right? We discovered that recently. We talked about that. Sh by the way, when we were watching Eephus,

  I think it was that day that I caught the news that Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose were made eligible for the Hall of Fame in baseball. Right. So the lifetime ban for the Hall of Fame, yeah, has been over. Or now it's both of them are dead. So crazy. They can be in the Hall of Fame again. we both have one more movie left on our top five list of all time. Drumroll. I think it's Eephus. I think so. I th for me it's EFUS and I don't even think that's recency bias. I looked at lots of baseball movies and I was like, I think Eephus gets in and I've only seen it twice. Yeah. And the second time might have been weirdly

  just as rewarding as the first time for its own reasons. But yeah, I it's incredible. And honestly, I think it's maybe the only at least the only one on my list that you if you want to have thoughts about our current moment, you should watch this movie right now. Maybe I do want to go back and and as a man of a certain age, rewatch Field of Dreams to see if the nostalgia hits me different. But like I think the only of these now, I guess nine, eight movies, because we had two overlaps, the eight movies we just got done talking about.

  Eephus is the one I would watch first. I worry that if I go back and watch Field of Dreams, the some of the scenes in it would just be they'd hit a little weird and I might not the c the costner of it all. The I don't know. And I mean back to the racial dynamics, that's probably why I'm never gonna watch Major League again. Wait. yeah. And didn't you discover you didn't realize that Abby Hoffman was in Field of Dreams as a little kid? Yeah. Super funny. All right. There's our top five. that was a fun gimmick to get through. And yeah, let's wrap this thing up. I think

  I feel like I should turn my South Hill as a South Hill Turkey. I should turn my South Hill Turkey's hat into a rally hat right now and say that like for this movie, like the entire project of this podcast, going to the movie theater again, watching movies with people, that is basically the plot of Eephus, participating things together. It has become way too novel. I will say, despite enjoying my second viewing, watching it on my computer kind of sucked. Yeah. Going in the theater. Dude, I enjoyed it, but it wasn't anywhere near the same experience. I missed the group that I

  watched it with, I wished I was with those baseball players again. so the sun is setting on the last ever baseball game in the movie Eephus, and this is a movie about death while movies themselves are dying. But I think I'm just gonna caveat that and say, it's the industry. It's the Hollywood traditional industry of movies. Let them die. Let's let's let's go support the Omnes Films of the world. Yeah, I agree with that. That's that's just it. Like this is a movie about being in space with other humans and it's a call

  You know, the ability to be around people is not to be taken for granted. And but it's also something we have to actively do or there these spaces just won't exist anymore. That's it for this episode of all those moments. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever podcasts are served. Check out the other movies from Omnes Films, Christmas Eve and Miller's Point, No Sleep Till, Los Capetulos Perditos, which means the lost chapters. Thank you, Luke.

  Thanks, Benji. This is a lot of fun. And like that character Troy who's laying in the outfield because he just doesn't want to see it go away. His his favorite sport on the the field that he's played so many games. This is what our friend Ross had to say about his last moments of playing what he called meaningful baseball. Maybe the reason I still play baseball is because my last high school game, but we were playing at at Indian Stadium. We were like down and I run out to my position.

  You know, Don Henley, like, after the Boys of Summer Are Gone was playing. And I've never had a more like visceral like moment in my life where it was like, god. Like, this is over. And I've played since I was five years old. I'm never gonna play in a meaningful baseball game again. No. Until now, Turkeys. Yeah, until now, Turkeys.

  01:11:27

  Ep.002 Eephus Episode 07 20 25 Final Spotify (01:11:30.958) In time I