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The title of Carson Lund’s feature-length directorial debut, Eephus, refers to one of the rarest of baseball pitches, an unnaturally slow curveball with plenty of topspin that’s incredibly difficult to hit. At one point in the film, which depicts the final game between two recreation-league teams on a small-town Massachusetts intramural field due to be paved over, a player explains the philosophy behind the pitch to a teammate. As he does so, we’re subtly tasked with thinking of the film’s characters, so superficially awkward in their skill set, as extensions of the pitch: weapons of deception and surprise, not least of which for how they increasingly reveal their passion for the sport and each other as the game unfurls.
Both teams comprise rosters of middle-aged, mostly out-of-shape men for whom this rec league is more of an excuse to get out of the house than anything.
Both teams comprise rosters of middle-aged, mostly out-of-shape men for whom this rec league is more of an excuse to get out of the house than anything.
- 7/1/2024
- by Jake Cole
- Slant Magazine
![Image](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjkzMDllODktOWY5Ny00ZTdhLWE5MjMtMmRlZDA0MTUxZjIwXkEyXkFqcGc@._V1_QL75_UY281_CR171,0,500,281_.jpg)
Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.For more Cannes 2024 coverage, subscribe to the Weekly Edit newsletter.Eephus.For all the thrills that come from watching the latest film by this or that renowned auteur, I don’t come to Cannes for confirmation, but for the pleasure of discovery. And nothing quite matches the exhilaration of reckoning with a new voice—the kind that jolts you out of your festival torpor and reminds you of all the beauty and magic the cinema can muster. As usual, those epiphanies were a lot harder to come by in the official competition than in the risk-friendlier Directors’ Fortnight, an independent sidebar born in 1969 as a counterprogram dedicated, per its mission statement, “to showcasing the most singular forms of contemporary cinema.” It is here that some of the greatest have shown their earliest stuff, an illustrious pedigree that’s flaunted before each screening through a short reel...
- 5/29/2024
- MUBI
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Yogi Berra, perhaps the greatest catcher in history, is quoted in Carson Lund’s “Eephus,” a movie about players who, unlike Berra, are never going to trouble the Baseball Hall of Fame’s induction committee. To homage so lofty a legend in so humble a film is a pretty big swing. But one likes to think Berra would be tickled by the shout-out in this lovely little sundowner movie, during which a bunch of middle-aged casual players use the excuse of the last game of their season — and perhaps ever — to valiantly fight the dying of the light. After all, wasn’t he the guy who coined “The future ain’t what it used to be”?
The future sure looks different, suddenly, for the Adler’s Paint and Riverdogs adult-league teams who have played regularly at Soldier’s Field, the public pitch serving their small New England town, for years.
The future sure looks different, suddenly, for the Adler’s Paint and Riverdogs adult-league teams who have played regularly at Soldier’s Field, the public pitch serving their small New England town, for years.
- 5/21/2024
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
![Image](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZjJmYjAxYWMtNjM4Mi00ZTFkLTgxNDYtOTU0NzJmMzM3N2QzXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTE0MzQwMjgz._V1_QL75_UY281_CR87,0,500,281_.jpg)
If the perfect sports movie illuminates the fundamentals that make one fall in love with the game, there may be no better movie about baseball than Carson Lund’s Eephus. Structured solely around a single round of America’s national pastime, Lund’s debut feature beautifully, humorously articulates the particular nuances, rhythms, and details of an amateur men’s league game. By subverting tropes of the standard sports movie––which often captures peak physical performance in front of legions of adoring fans––Lund has crafted something far more singularly compelling. Rather than grand slams and no-hitters, there are errors aplenty and no shortage of beer guts and weathered muscles amongst the motley crew. Lund is more interested in examining the peculiar set of social codes that only apply when one is on the field, unimpeded by life’s responsibilities and entirely focused on the rules of the game.
Carrying an...
Carrying an...
- 5/19/2024
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
![Image](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZGFhZWIzYmYtMDA5Zi00YmRkLWExNDMtZGU2OWMxNzBiMzg3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTE0MzQwMjgz._V1_QL75_UX500_CR0,0,500,281_.jpg)
Omnes Films has a goal. “Our mission is to fill a void in modern cinema,” says its website. “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.” It sounds wildly ambitious, and maybe it is, but Cannes audiences will be the judge of that when two of its films — Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point by Tyler Taormina and Eephus by Carson Lund — premiere in Directors’ Fortnight.
Taormina and Lund met at college in Boston, where the former was studying screenwriting and the latter film production. Lund, says Taormina, “was always like the crazily prodigious cinematographer. Everyone was very intimidated by this man.” Taormina, meanwhile, wanted to make kids TV. While waiting for a script to sell, Taormina had the idea for a loose indie called Ham on Rye (2019). Lund signed on as DoP, and Omnes was born.
Says Lund, “Omnes is a loose collective that’s becoming tighter. In college I made a short film called Omnes. It’s a sort of a Latin term that’s used often in theater by a director when he needs to get the attention of the cast and crew. And so, we started to tag our films as Omnes Productions. And then we said, ‘You know what? We should make this a real thing.’ So, we rebranded from Omnes Productions to Omnes Films. We wanted to really make it a cinema collective. We’re not an official company, in the sense that we don’t have an LLC or anything. To us, just a symbol of our friendship, our collaboration.”
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
First out of the gate was Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, based on the director’s experience of family gatherings in the early 2000s. “This movie came from many things,” he says, “but I think the genesis was watching my parents’ wedding video on their 30th anniversary. This was some years ago now, and it deeply moved me.”
“I started to revisit some home videos at that time,” he continues, “and I realized pretty quickly that I actually have a total incapability of watching them. I’m too sentimental. It’s too heavy for me to watch my family when we were all so much younger.” That was when the idea of making a Christmas movie came to him. “Once I had that, I knew it would be the way to go. Or, maybe I didn’t know, but I figured that it would be the way that I could reanimate and dwell in the sentimentality that means so much to me.”
Taormina’s film is notable for its striking barrage of kitsch pop classics, which cineastes will recognize from Kenneth Anger’s experimental 1963 film Scorpio Rising. “The option of using Christmas music was just an absolute no. That would’ve been a real cringe-worthy move. But I’m very inspired by Kenneth Anger, very much so, to the point where there’s a central scene in my previous film, Ham on Rye, which was originally conceived and shot to the song he uses in Kustom Kar Kommandos [1965].
“Anger has remained an inciting inspiration for all the work I’ve done so far,” he continues, “and, for this one, Scorpio Rising was there at the beginning. I think we subconsciously realized that this music from the ’60s would make perfect Christmas music, because groups like The Ronettes and so on and so forth went on to make all these famous Christmas songs, so you hear that sound and it immediately feels festive. So, it was kind of a cheat. And on top of that, which ones to choose was very fun for me, because I was actually really interested in how the lyrics of these songs speak so much to the themes of the movie, because the context for a lot of these songs is love and love lost, you know?”
Eephus
Lund, meanwhile, had been cooking up Eephus, a personal story of his own, about a baseball field that is being demolished to build an elementary school. “We shot Eephus five months before Miller’s Point,” he recalls. “Tyler, I believe, had conceived of Miller’s Point maybe a little bit before I started writing Eephus, though I know we were kind of discussing the ideas at a similar time. I wrote Eephus largely during the pandemic, over Zoom, with my two co-writers, Mike Bassa and Nate Fisher. And then eventually when we finally got to work together in a room, we felt like things moved a bit quicker.”
Read the digital edition of Deadline’s Disruptors/Cannes magazine here.
Most of Lund’s career has been as a cinematographer and an editor. “I’d made short films, but I’d never written many screenplays,” he says. “I’m very attracted to location and light — that’s sort of the engine for my creative process — I had stumbled upon an idea where that was sort of the emphasis. Eephus is almost a landscape film, in that respect. I play baseball, and I play in a Sunday League, like the one depicted in the film. I was looking for material that would be personal to me but that also scratched this itch of making a film that would track the process of day turning to night over the course of one afternoon in New England and in fall, which is to me the most beautiful time for baseball.”
The directors were taken aback when both films made it into Cannes. “Honestly,” says Lund, “when one of them got in, we thought, ‘Ok, maybe they won’t program both.’ I mean, we don’t want to look like we’re trying to corner the market! But it happened, and we’re thrilled and a little surprised, for sure. But I think it’s a testament to the Fortnight that they’re keeping their eye on these kind of homegrown, handmade, independent films from America. Films that have a kind of different tone and vision.”...
Taormina and Lund met at college in Boston, where the former was studying screenwriting and the latter film production. Lund, says Taormina, “was always like the crazily prodigious cinematographer. Everyone was very intimidated by this man.” Taormina, meanwhile, wanted to make kids TV. While waiting for a script to sell, Taormina had the idea for a loose indie called Ham on Rye (2019). Lund signed on as DoP, and Omnes was born.
Says Lund, “Omnes is a loose collective that’s becoming tighter. In college I made a short film called Omnes. It’s a sort of a Latin term that’s used often in theater by a director when he needs to get the attention of the cast and crew. And so, we started to tag our films as Omnes Productions. And then we said, ‘You know what? We should make this a real thing.’ So, we rebranded from Omnes Productions to Omnes Films. We wanted to really make it a cinema collective. We’re not an official company, in the sense that we don’t have an LLC or anything. To us, just a symbol of our friendship, our collaboration.”
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
First out of the gate was Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, based on the director’s experience of family gatherings in the early 2000s. “This movie came from many things,” he says, “but I think the genesis was watching my parents’ wedding video on their 30th anniversary. This was some years ago now, and it deeply moved me.”
“I started to revisit some home videos at that time,” he continues, “and I realized pretty quickly that I actually have a total incapability of watching them. I’m too sentimental. It’s too heavy for me to watch my family when we were all so much younger.” That was when the idea of making a Christmas movie came to him. “Once I had that, I knew it would be the way to go. Or, maybe I didn’t know, but I figured that it would be the way that I could reanimate and dwell in the sentimentality that means so much to me.”
Taormina’s film is notable for its striking barrage of kitsch pop classics, which cineastes will recognize from Kenneth Anger’s experimental 1963 film Scorpio Rising. “The option of using Christmas music was just an absolute no. That would’ve been a real cringe-worthy move. But I’m very inspired by Kenneth Anger, very much so, to the point where there’s a central scene in my previous film, Ham on Rye, which was originally conceived and shot to the song he uses in Kustom Kar Kommandos [1965].
“Anger has remained an inciting inspiration for all the work I’ve done so far,” he continues, “and, for this one, Scorpio Rising was there at the beginning. I think we subconsciously realized that this music from the ’60s would make perfect Christmas music, because groups like The Ronettes and so on and so forth went on to make all these famous Christmas songs, so you hear that sound and it immediately feels festive. So, it was kind of a cheat. And on top of that, which ones to choose was very fun for me, because I was actually really interested in how the lyrics of these songs speak so much to the themes of the movie, because the context for a lot of these songs is love and love lost, you know?”
Eephus
Lund, meanwhile, had been cooking up Eephus, a personal story of his own, about a baseball field that is being demolished to build an elementary school. “We shot Eephus five months before Miller’s Point,” he recalls. “Tyler, I believe, had conceived of Miller’s Point maybe a little bit before I started writing Eephus, though I know we were kind of discussing the ideas at a similar time. I wrote Eephus largely during the pandemic, over Zoom, with my two co-writers, Mike Bassa and Nate Fisher. And then eventually when we finally got to work together in a room, we felt like things moved a bit quicker.”
Read the digital edition of Deadline’s Disruptors/Cannes magazine here.
Most of Lund’s career has been as a cinematographer and an editor. “I’d made short films, but I’d never written many screenplays,” he says. “I’m very attracted to location and light — that’s sort of the engine for my creative process — I had stumbled upon an idea where that was sort of the emphasis. Eephus is almost a landscape film, in that respect. I play baseball, and I play in a Sunday League, like the one depicted in the film. I was looking for material that would be personal to me but that also scratched this itch of making a film that would track the process of day turning to night over the course of one afternoon in New England and in fall, which is to me the most beautiful time for baseball.”
The directors were taken aback when both films made it into Cannes. “Honestly,” says Lund, “when one of them got in, we thought, ‘Ok, maybe they won’t program both.’ I mean, we don’t want to look like we’re trying to corner the market! But it happened, and we’re thrilled and a little surprised, for sure. But I think it’s a testament to the Fortnight that they’re keeping their eye on these kind of homegrown, handmade, independent films from America. Films that have a kind of different tone and vision.”...
- 5/15/2024
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
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Exclusive: E! has released details on its first of six original scripted romantic comedy movies. The network has begun production on Married By Mistake (working title), with Chloe Bennet, Blair Penner and Anthony Konechny set to lead the cast.
Married by Mistake follows Riley (Bennet) who, after learning that her dream job has fallen through, has a drunken night out with her best friend Nate… (Penner) only to find themselves the next morning in Las Vegas and married. With no job prospects on the horizon, Riley takes Nate up on his offer to move back to his hometown in Tennessee to help rescue his family’s business. Riley’s determination to make a name for herself in the company is complicated by the arrival of Nate’s ex-girlfriend and his attractive older brother. Will Riley and Nate be able to keep up the ruse, or will romances both new and old get in the way?...
Married by Mistake follows Riley (Bennet) who, after learning that her dream job has fallen through, has a drunken night out with her best friend Nate… (Penner) only to find themselves the next morning in Las Vegas and married. With no job prospects on the horizon, Riley takes Nate up on his offer to move back to his hometown in Tennessee to help rescue his family’s business. Riley’s determination to make a name for herself in the company is complicated by the arrival of Nate’s ex-girlfriend and his attractive older brother. Will Riley and Nate be able to keep up the ruse, or will romances both new and old get in the way?...
- 7/29/2022
- by Sofia Behzadi
- Deadline Film + TV
![Reba McEntire, Jensen Ackles, Katheryn Winnick, and Kylie Bunbury in Big Sky (2020)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTM2Y2NjZmMtZWZiZi00ZDAxLTgxODctMmFiOTI2ZjY3YWE5XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjYwNDA2MDE@._V1_QL75_UX140_CR0,1,140,207_.jpg)
![Reba McEntire, Jensen Ackles, Katheryn Winnick, and Kylie Bunbury in Big Sky (2020)](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTM2Y2NjZmMtZWZiZi00ZDAxLTgxODctMmFiOTI2ZjY3YWE5XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjYwNDA2MDE@._V1_QL75_UX140_CR0,1,140,207_.jpg)
The Paley Center for Media announced its full lineup of programming for the virtual PaleyFest LA 2021.
Freshman entries such as Big Sky, Lovecraft Country, and Ted Lasso will be joined by the likes of The Good Doctor, What We Do in the Shadows, and so much more.
What's more, a 20th-anniversary panel for Six Feet Under will also be a part of the milestone event.
“For thirty-eight years, PaleyFest LA has been uniting fans with the casts and creative teams behind the most acclaimed and buzzworthy television shows, delighting audiences with exclusive behind-the-scenes and breaking news stories,” said Maureen J. Reidy, the Paley Center’s President & CEO.
“We are proud to have Citi and Verizon as the official sponsors, and are thankful for their continued support and commitment to highlighting diverse and original voices on television.”
All programs will be available starting Friday, March 26, to view by Citi cardmembers and Paley members.
Freshman entries such as Big Sky, Lovecraft Country, and Ted Lasso will be joined by the likes of The Good Doctor, What We Do in the Shadows, and so much more.
What's more, a 20th-anniversary panel for Six Feet Under will also be a part of the milestone event.
“For thirty-eight years, PaleyFest LA has been uniting fans with the casts and creative teams behind the most acclaimed and buzzworthy television shows, delighting audiences with exclusive behind-the-scenes and breaking news stories,” said Maureen J. Reidy, the Paley Center’s President & CEO.
“We are proud to have Citi and Verizon as the official sponsors, and are thankful for their continued support and commitment to highlighting diverse and original voices on television.”
All programs will be available starting Friday, March 26, to view by Citi cardmembers and Paley members.
- 2/23/2021
- by Paul Dailly
- TVfanatic
![Image](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BM2E0ZjAxNDQtZWI5OC00YzI0LWFhODgtZTg2OWVlZjU4YzZlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTE0MzQwMjgz._V1_QL75_UX500_CR0,0,500,281_.jpg)
The Paley Center for Media on Tuesday announced the full lineup of programming for the all-virtual PaleyFest LA 2021.
This year’s selections include freshman entries such as ABC’s Big Sky, HBO’s Lovecraft Country, Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso and CBS’s Evil as well as more venerable titles such as ABC’s The Good Doctor, FX’s What We Do in the Shadows and CBS’s The Late Late Show with James Corden. There will also be a 20th Anniversary Conversation with members of the cast and creative team from HBO’s Six Feet Under.
“For thirty-eight years, PaleyFest LA has been uniting fans with the casts and creative teams behind the most acclaimed and buzzworthy television shows, delighting audiences with exclusive behind-the-scenes and breaking news stories,” said Maureen J. Reidy, the Paley Center’s President & CEO. “We are proud to have Citi...
This year’s selections include freshman entries such as ABC’s Big Sky, HBO’s Lovecraft Country, Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso and CBS’s Evil as well as more venerable titles such as ABC’s The Good Doctor, FX’s What We Do in the Shadows and CBS’s The Late Late Show with James Corden. There will also be a 20th Anniversary Conversation with members of the cast and creative team from HBO’s Six Feet Under.
“For thirty-eight years, PaleyFest LA has been uniting fans with the casts and creative teams behind the most acclaimed and buzzworthy television shows, delighting audiences with exclusive behind-the-scenes and breaking news stories,” said Maureen J. Reidy, the Paley Center’s President & CEO. “We are proud to have Citi...
- 2/23/2021
- by Tom Tapp
- Deadline Film + TV
![Image](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZjBiNDFjOGYtNDcyMS00YjU2LTg3NWMtMmVkNzMwOWE5YmY4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTE0MzQwMjgz._V1_QL75_UX140_CR0,0,140,140_.jpg)
![Image](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZjBiNDFjOGYtNDcyMS00YjU2LTg3NWMtMmVkNzMwOWE5YmY4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTE0MzQwMjgz._V1_QL75_UX140_CR0,0,140,140_.jpg)
This story was originally published August 20th, 2015.
It’s easy to imagine that, 15 years from now, television audiences will take for granted the existence of groundbreaking series like Orange Is the New Black and Transparent. But it’s impossible to look at the currently lush television landscape without acknowledging the debt that most popular shows owe to HBO at the turn of the new millennium.
While network television continued raking in the advertising dollars with surefire bets and lowest-common denominators, the premium cable channel was kickstarting its own quiet revolution,...
It’s easy to imagine that, 15 years from now, television audiences will take for granted the existence of groundbreaking series like Orange Is the New Black and Transparent. But it’s impossible to look at the currently lush television landscape without acknowledging the debt that most popular shows owe to HBO at the turn of the new millennium.
While network television continued raking in the advertising dollars with surefire bets and lowest-common denominators, the premium cable channel was kickstarting its own quiet revolution,...
- 8/24/2020
- by Jennifer Wood
- Rollingstone.com
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