New Releases: About Thirty (Martin Shanly, 2023), Eephus (Carson Lund, 2024)
I’m in China right now, and haven’t had much time to write or watch, but I still thought I’d chime in on two new releases I caught just before leaving. Both are warmly recommended.
About Thirty (Martin Shanly, 2023):
Martin Shanly’s About Thirty is one of the best new releases I’ve seen all year. A pandemic-set adult coming of age story, Shanly plays the jobless and friendless Arturo. Journeying through his diary, the film moves back and forth through the preceding decade, visiting the embarrassing, often painful moments that have led him to this current moment. It’s a great quarter-life spiral movie that’s frequently hilarious, meaningfully self-indicting, and very gay.
Humming with a low-key desperation, About Thirty differentiates itself with its formal intricacy. Featuring a structure that moves with Arturo’s internal monologue, often hopping between narratives before especially shameful events, and a subtly expressionist depiction of space (consistent cuts to Arturo’s diary drawings remind us that what we’re seeing onscreen is distorted by regret), Shanly maintains a consistent feeling of confrontation, heightened by spurts of rapid-fire montage and inserts of flipping pages. Somehow both agitated and reflective (a dynamic perfectly captured in the final telephoto zoom), About Thirty is an emotionally affecting tale of self-reckoning.
About Thirty is available to stream on Kanopy
Eephus (Carson Lund, 2024):
Eephus, the feature debut of former critic/cinematographer Carson Lund, is the latest from the filmmaking collective Omnes Films, a group whose prominence reached new heights last year when both Eephus and Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point were selected to screen at Directors’ Fortnight. One of the most consistent producers of interesting independent film in the United States, Omnes fuses classic Americana with a sensibility rooted in international cinema.
Case in point, Eephus which finds a connection between baseball (“you wait for something to happen and poof it’s over”) and Tsai Ming Liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Taking inspiration from that film’s premise (Eephus is set during the final recreational game at an East Coast baseball field) and its sense of an entire ecosystem orbiting the central space (a function of exaggerated, physical characterizations), Lund injects a “guys being dudes” hangout comedy. Admittedly, this type of macho cinema isn’t my thing, and I’m sure I would have found Eephus more charming if I were more familiar with baseball, but the film is impressive nonetheless.
Lund’s signature cinematography, typified by creamy, saturated colors and slight over-exposure, shoots the present with the sheen of memory. Aside from the intricately blocked shots of players on the pitch, I loved Eephus’s rich immersion in East Coast suburbia with its intermittent use of crackling radio (narrated by Frederick Wiseman!) and pillow shots of dense autumn foliage. In line with the players’ joviality, Lund cheekily takes the piss out of these more contemplative interludes, literally so in the film’s only dissolve, which transitions from a beautiful shot of the night sky to the umpire peeing in the woods.
Eephus is distributed by Music Box Films and is now playing at the SIFF Uptown.