Until a day or two ago I hadn’t spoken to anyone who’d actually seen Clint Eastwood‘s Jersey Boys (Warner Bros., 6.20) which is closing out the Los Angeles Film Festival. Then I realized that a critic friend had recently had the pleasure. Me: “So on a scale of 1 to 10, Jersey Boys is a…?” Critic friend: “Thankfully I haven’t had to give scores like this since I stopped reviewing on [a radio show] a few years back.” Me: “It’s at least a 7 or 7.5, right? Clint always delivers a 7 at least. Naturally I’d prefer an 8. I know it’s not an 8.5 or a 9. I mean, I strongly suspect as much. 10 is obviously out of the question.” Critic friend: “You’re incorrigible.”

I haven’t exactly gotten off the Gregg Araki boat. Call me an occcasional traveller when the journey seems right. You can always count on actors dropping trou in any Araki film — that’s pretty much a guaranteed element. Anyway, I’m not enough of a devotee to have seen White Bird in a Blizzard (Magnolia, early fall release on all platforms) at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. The following is a non-trailer — it’s just a clip reel. The actual trailer, which is something like six months old, is after the jump.

Chapman and MacLain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball, which I saw and raved about at Sundance 2014, will debut on Netflix on July 11th. It’s a wonderfully spirited doc about a scrappy-ass minor-league Portland baseball team called the Mavericks. The “Mavs” were a genuinely independent operation (i.e., not a farm team for a major-league club) that was owned and managed by character actor Bing Russell, the father of Kurt Russell. The Mavs lasted for five years — 73′ to ’77. The doc is about a proudly non-corporate baseball team. It’s about spunk and tobacco juice. It’s about a team of third- and fourth-rate players who won games, sold a shitload of tickets and revitalized the Portland baseball scene.

In response to 3.13.14 HE piece called “The New Ray?,” HE commenter Anna Zed wrote the following: “I knew James Brown, and his bombastic personality and absolutely unmistakeable personal style (not to mention his checkered personal life) really don’t seem like they would lend themselves to this kind of glossy wash to me.

“As you say physically he was a very dark-skinned black man, intensely muscular and frenetic, thick necked and small (not matinee idol material at all, or even lead singer style for the period that he emerged) who just burst past all of these qualities that might seem to have hindered his appeal by sheer force of will, fantastic charisma, unstoppable originality as a musical stylist and an almost psychotic belief in himself (like Muhammad Ali).

Good music yesterday is good music today. You just have to let it in. Passively, I mean. Stillness is key. (Speed-walking on a treadmill at 24 Hour Fitness…not so much.) I was reminded of this last night while driving 75 mph in the dark on the relatively uncrowded 405 freeway. It might be the best music-listening activity of all. Especially if the music has the right kind of nocturnal freeway-flow vibe in the first place. Which Joni Mitchell‘s Hejira definitely has. The Wikipage page quotes Mitchell as saying that “the whole Hejira album was really inspired…I wrote the album while traveling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it…the sweet loneliness of solitary travel.” All my life I’ve loved Mitchell’s stuff for all the right reasons, but I was especially impressed last night by the quality and the exquisite recording of the session performances on this 1976 album. The gently layered guitar and bass arrangements are so precisely laid down, and yet with a professional aplomb that’s so swoony and soft and lulling…and yet stirring to the depths. All hail Larry Carlton (acoustic & electric guitars), Max Bennett (bass on “Song for Sharon”, “Furry Sings the Blues”), John Guerin and Bobbye Hall (drums, percussion).

No lie — this might be the best film festival come-on trailer I’ve ever seen. I can’t figure which agency threw it together, but (a) it’s narrated by Billy Bob Thornton and (b) the copy is from Shel Silverstein‘s “Invitation” from “Where the Sidewalk Ends.” My press pass is good to go, but I haven’t yet wangled a ticket to the opening-night (i.e., this evening’s) Snowpiercer screening.

Okay, this looks pretty funny. Even if you’re not a Farrelly Brothers fan it’s obvious this will deliver at least some of the goods. But I still say this kind of humor works better with guys in their 20s or 30s than with guys on the downslope of middle age. Dumb and Dumber 2 will open on 11.14.14. I suspect that the general response will be (a) “this is almost as good as the original” and (b) an almost-as-good box-office response along with (c) people muttering to themselves as they shuffle out of the theatre that “okay, maybe you can go home again but older is still older.”

From a 9.25.13 post called “Long of Tooth“: “When Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels costarred in the Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber (’94) they were roughly 32 and 39 years old, respectively. Obviously not spring chickens but relatively buoyant, fresh-faced, elastic of bod. Now they’re costarring in the Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber 2, which I suspect will be funny and inventive (I was a fan of the Farrelly’s Three Stooges flick), but now we’re talking about a 51 year-old and a 58 year-old playing the same characters.