“Yet for all his fidelity to the Broadway source, Clint Eastwood has made a Jersey Boys movie that ultimately differs from the stage version in several key respects. It’s an altogether moodier, more real, edgier piece of work, more Bird than Bye Bye Birdie, giving equal weight to the personal tragedies of Frankie Valli and his bandmates — busted-up marriages, estranged children, embezzlement scams and dangerous entanglements with the Jersey mob — as to their professional triumphs. Onstage, misfortune was frequently softened by the show’s overarching uptempo mood. But onscreen, Eastwood hits as many blue notes as four-part harmonies.” — from Scott Foundas‘s 6.10 Variety piece on Eastwood and the film.

Let me guess — it’s discovered sometime during Act Two that Kim Jong-Un has a cashew-sized dick? That seems to be the level that this political farce (if you want to dignify it by calling it that) is operating on. Deflate a vile, beyond-corrupt real-life dictator by humiliating him in various personal ways. And yet I’m interested. The old-world precedents seem to be Charlie Chaplin‘s The Great Dictator mixed with Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. It’s interesting that co-directors and co-writers Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen (who also costars with Pineapple Express homie James Franco) have decided that the core audience won’t laugh or relate unless their characters, who are supposed to be slick, top-level TV broadcast guys, are portrayed as mentally challenged primitives. It’s interesting also that they were inspired to go semi-political only because the Korean dictator belongs to Rogen and Goldberg’s generation (he’s only 31, born on 1.8.83). It’s like they’re saying to themselves, “Whoa…even somebody from our own generational team can be a malignant dictatorial asshat! Total eye-opener, dude!” Sidenote: Rogen and Goldberg will be seen as having no balls at all — none — if they don’t find some way of putting Dennis Rodman into this thing. I’m serious.

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.

Day-After Flashback: I was a bit southeast of Long Beach on the 405 around 5:20 pm when rush hour hit. Instant parking lot, no point. So I got off and consulted Yelp and drove over to a Starbucks in a bedroom community called Fountain Valley. (I saw no fountains or valleys but I did see an endless sprawl of soul-less corporate chain stores.) The Starbucks was spacious and quiet and soothing to hang in — an oasis surrounded by soul-numbing emptiness. I sat in a nice comfy leather chair and tapped out two or three stories and then I leaned back and closed my eyes. I woke up two hours and 15 minutes later (or around 8:35 pm) — same position, nothing stolen, iPhone in my pocket, Macbook Pro on my lap. But my head was a little foggy. I looked at this trailer for Frontera and thought, “Ed Harris is basically playing a Tommy Lee Jones role here.” And so I tapped out the title of this post and got up and walked across the sprawling parking lot and got in the car and drove back to WeHo.

I drove down to Tijuana this morning (another dental appointment) and then made my way back this afternoon. It took almost two full hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic to get through the U.S. border checkpoint. Anyway, as I was idling and enjoying the warmth of the Mexican sun on my left arm, I discovered a piece on The Awl that seemed at first glance to be a reasonably comprehensive abridged history of the rise and fall of Entertainment Weekly, for which I served as a freelancer from ’91 through ’96. The author is Anne Helen Petersen, who was just a tyke when EW began publishing 24 years ago. I sent the piece to a couple of ex-EW staffers but no replies thus far. It’s composed from the perspective of upper-echelon staffers. I could have used a few more anecdotes and first-hand recollections but it’s not a bad stab for an article of this size. Petersen excerpt: “Some would suggest it [it’s not] the content but the delivery system. Who wants to pay for a magazine, delivered once a week, when you can find deeper, more visual, more immediate content online and for free?”

Genuine verisimilitude in the depiction of 20th Century warfare (such as Stanley Kubrick‘s depiction of WWI trench warfare in Paths of Glory) is out the window these days. I despise this state of affairs but I accept it. All 21st Century action-conflict movies are more or less expected to (a) somehow out-perform the last similar action-conflict movie in terms of outrageous grandeur or explosions or audacious visual effects and (b) have to deliver X-treme action scenes that defy basic physics and blow your socks off. I don’t know how David Ayer‘s Fury (Columbia, 11.14) will actually play, but I’ll be flabbergasted if it doesn’t follow these mandates.