Except for Netflix, these Google Ads that went up today are horrific. I’ve never had ads on this site that looked so ugly and low-rent and angled at the Walmart crowd. HE happens to be in an in-between period between film-campaign ads, and I was persuaded to allow the Google Adsense ads to run because it’s money and it couldn’t hurt. But look at them! They do hurt!

I once saw Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh. She was standing about ten or twelve feet away in a dense crowd of guys at an after-party at the Roxy, the popular Manhattan roller disco on West 18th, sometime in ’79 or ’80. I managed a glimpse or two of her eyes, and was slightly surprised to discover that they really were as beautiful as I’d been told. I was mesmerized. I think I actually said out loud, “Wow.”

Elizabeth Taylor in either a Cat On a Hot Tin Roof or Butterfield 8 publicity still.

I’d been looking at Taylor in film after film all my life, of course, but those real-life peepers had an extra-glistening, pools-of-passion, send-your-hormones-to-the-moon quality that I’d never quite gotten from a live female before. And they actually did seem to be violet colored, as legend had it.

And now she’s gone at age 79. Everyone and everything fades and recedes and moves on to the next dimension and/or state of being — no exceptions. The once-legendary Taylor, who hit her career and erotic hottitude peak between ’51 (A Place in The Sun) and ’60 (Butterfield 8), has left the earth. Death will happen one day to Chloe Moretz, to Angelina Jolie, to Johnny Depp, to Justin Timberlake, to myself, to Tom O’Neil, to Scott Feinberg, to my two cats….it’s as natural as breathing. But no one likes to think about that, and when somebody like La Liz passes away, it’s like everyone is collectively taking a big solemn gulp and saying, “Uhhm…oh, wow, yeah…of course.”

And the natural urge is to celebrate the highlights. But I can never quite bring myself to do that. Not 100%, I mean.

I’d heard early on that Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t the brightest bulb on the planet. I’d heard a story about her being at a pool party and asking someone what the calendar date was, and that person suggesting that she check the newspaper lying on a table nearby, and Liz doing so and saying the paper was no help because it was from the day before…or words to that effect.

But I heard and read a lot more about her as time went on, and I became persuaded that she was tough and real and super-loyal to her friends…although I never understood why she befriended the freak known as Michael Jackson. I had read once that she saved Montgomery Clift‘s life just after his 5.12.56 car crash by extracting a dislodged tooth that had been stuck in his wind pipe. By all accounts she was a good person to know and share time on the planet with, and also that she was feisty and steady and reliable and no fool. And she liked to drink and have fun and laugh through it all….hah!

I think, in short, that she might have been a somewhat better person than she was an actress. I’m not dismissing her very good ’50s performances in A Place In The Sun, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Butterfield 8. But she was really quite atrocious — certainly miscast — in the miserable Cleopatra, and with the exception of her brilliant, possibly all-time best performance in Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, she stopped getting the good roles after that and just wasn’t a very interesting presence in the ’60s and ’70s. She was pretty much out of the game by the early 80s.

Her golden time was the 1950s, period, and she was at her hottest back then also. She started to put on weight after Butterfield 8 (i.e., after she hit her early 30s), and the hard truth is that she looked vaguely plump in Cleopatra, and that roundish, slightly boozy and besotted look never went away after that. I’m sorry but that’s how it pretty much was. But those eyes of hers were givers of rapture and splendor.

Taylor lived a hell of a life, and stories will be told and re-told about her over the next two or three days that will refresh feelings of affection and respect and nostalgia, etc. She knew and jousted and clinked glasses with all the best people of her time, and sometimes loved and/or went to bed with men of great style and accomplishment and character and pizazz. (Except for Larry Fortensky.) It’s become more-or-less accepted doctrine that Richard Burton was the love of her life.

Does GenX or GenY know or care about Taylor? Probably not very much.

Honestly? I was looking around this morning for that SNL clip from ’78 or ’79 when John Belushi dressed up as Fat Liz eating fried chicken (and being interviewed by Bill Murray), and then pretending to choke on a chicken bone — that was hilarious.

My only other first-hand connection with La Liz has been my numerous sleepovers at the Nicky Hilton-Elizabeth Taylor house on Route 102 in Georgetown, Connecticut, as the guest of cartoonist Chance Browne. It’s a small cottage where Hilton and Taylor stayed for a period in 1950 during their brief rocky marrriage before she sued for divorce (she complained of spousal abuse) — local legend says Hilton threw Taylor out a window during one of their drunken fights.

In 2.12.11 posting called “Miss Tits”, I wrote that “what life’s natural process does to all of us in the end, even the luckiest and most beautiful and most magnificently endowed, is fairly horrific. I presume it’s understood that it was the great love of Elizabeth Taylor‘s life, Richard Burton, who came up with the above nickname during the shooting of Cleopatra.”

Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner and Daniel Day Lewis‘s Lincoln will be a sad story, an Oscar-worthy collaboration, a possibly legendary performance…who knows? But it will be primarily be about Kushner’s screenplay and capturing something very familiar. Words, dialogue, history…one of those films that owes a certain allegiance to what has already been imagined by millions. So it will be, in a sense, constrained by this. But Spielberg‘s War Horse, which will open on 12.26, could be another matter. Maybe.

I haven’t read Lee Hall and Richard Curtis‘s War Horse screenplay or seen the B’way play, but my vision (which I feel is wise) has always been that it’s Au Hasard Balthazar surrounded by World War I — the story of an innocent creature made to suffer by selfish, warring, myopic men. And given the simple tone and spareness of the story, it follows that War Horse will probably be the last chance that Spielberg, who’s a lot closer to the end than the beginning, will have to make a piece of poetic, possibly wondrous arty-farty cinema for a mainstream audience.

Spielberg can get away with arts gratia artis because he’s Spielberg, and the Academy will love him for it, I believe, if he tries. Robert Bresson led the way; Spielberg has only to follow. But if he shoots the play — an integrated, multi-character drama in which the horse is central but only one of many characters — in typical manipulative Spielbergian fashion, then we will truly be finished in the minds of person like myself. He will have had his chance to make a largely non-verbal masterpiece, told from the POV of a horse, and blown it. I’m not hoping for this. I’m hoping that Spielberg lives up to the potential. But we all know his tendencies, don’t we?

This question can be answered now, of course, by anyone who’s read the script. Well?

Why didn’t they call this movie One-Armed Surfer? And I say this as someone who really and truly liked John Stockwell‘s Blue Crush, which this film is presumably trying to emulate on some level. I realize that One-Armed Surfer wouldn’t attract the Star-reading empties this movie is presumably aimed at, but still….Soul Surfer?

Anyone who seriously surfs knows it’s like worshipping at a great cathedral and communing with the eternal, so they’re a soul surfer to begin with. Having your arm bitten off by a shark or learning to live with a handicap is not, due respect, as soulful as the considerable zen of surfing itself. All I know is that the title has told me to avoid this film (opening on April 8th) at all costs.

The trailer for tonight’s ABC special called “BEST IN FILM: The Greatest Movies of Our Time” (9 pm) has me sputtering and gagging and spitting at the computer screen. My feelings of contempt for those who participated in this show — producers, guest hosts, hoi-polloi voters — are boundless. Harrison Ford agreed to take part in this?

Watch and listen to co-hosts Cynthia McFadden and Tom Bergeron and try not to think of “correcting” them Jack Torrance-style.

Originally posted on 3.21.11, but now updated: One of the healthiest things you can say about anything that’s over and done with is “okay, that happened.” Unless, of course, you’re talking about a stretch in a World War II concentration camp or something equally ghastly. Otherwise you have to be accepting, past it, unbothered. Especially when it comes to ex-girlfriends. We went there, it happened, nobody was right or wrong, that was then and we’re here now, living in the present…let’s get a coffee or a drink and catch up.

All my life I’ve been friends with exes, or have at least been open to same. And they’ve been open to calm and friendship with me. Except one. A very smart blonde with a great ass, a toothy smile and a relaxed and collegiate vibe. She’s married now and living in Pasadena; her husband — a slightly stocky, gray-haired guy of some means — doesn’t resemble me or her first husband (a doobie-toking small-business owner who owned a Harley and liked to go on long motorcycle trips with a gang of like-minded fellows) at all.

I gave up trying to be friendly with her three or four years ago. She really wants to erase that part of her life — the first marriage (which began in the summer of ’96) and the affair with me that began in early ’98 and lasted two and two-thirds years. We last spoke in ’11 or ’12. The most significant thing that happened before that was her friending me on Facebook.

Our thing began at the ’98 Sundance Film Festival and finally ran out of gas in late ’00 when her husband found out. I took the hurt and the lumps. I was dropped six or seven times. It was easily the most painful and frustrating relationship of my life. Whether things were good or bad between us was entirely dictated by her shifting moods. Her father had been a philanderer when she was fairly young and this had caused a lot of family pain, so she felt badly about following in his footsteps. But things kept on. She kept coming back and oh, the hunka-chunka.

Variety‘s Stuart Levine is reporting that Jeff Daniels is in negotiations to play an apparent mixture of Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz in Aaron Sorkin‘s cable-news HBO mini that’s been in the works for some time. Levine description of Daniels’ character, “the host of his own show who, from the network perspective, can be difficult to handle,” obviously echoes Olbermann and Schultz, and particularly their real-life dynamic with MSNBC’s Phil Griffin.

(l. to r.) Jeff Daniels, Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz

There’s amusement, I think, in Evan Rachel Wood having been cool with simulating blood-spattered animal sex with Marilyn Manson while fully nude in that Heart-Shaped Glasses music video, and then four years later telling Fancast’s Julie Zied that she was nervous about doing a full-frontal nude scene in Mildred Pierce and needing to be nudged into it by Kate Winslet, etc. The HBO miniseries, directed by Todd Haynes, debuts on 3.27.

I missed the press screenings of Neil Burger‘s Limitless, partly due to being in Austin last week, so last night I paid money (!) to see it at the Bruin in Westwood. Like everyone else I was simply intrigued by the idea of dropping a pill and suddenly being ten or twenty times brighter. I’d had a stirring time with William Hurt‘s radical transformation from cocky loquacious scientist to mystical raging-monk voyager in Ken Russell ‘s Altered States, and I sensed that a similar ride with Bradley Cooper might be in store.

And there is a 15- or 20-minute passage when Cooper, a failed New York writer, begins to pop tablet after tablet of an unapproved “smart drug” called NZT, one or two per day, and soon becomes a kind of intellectual superman. And it’s fun to share in this. The rest of the film is only so-so, but I was marginally impressed by Burger’s use of “welcome to a new world” visual effects — Cooper being split into several different like-minded versions of himself, the camera speeding into infinity, the world being a kind of sparkling acid-trip realm that Cooper is comprehending and adapting to with amazing ease.

For the first time in my life I started to wonder what it would be like to take Adderall, an FDA-approved treatment for ADD and ADHD but has long been a popular stimulant among writers. I’ve never taken any prescription medication for anything and I’m not likely to start now, but Limitless at least had me thinking about it. That in itself means something.

The second Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival will unfold from 4.28 though 5.1, mostly at the American Cinematheque and the Chinese. The progammers are Robert Osborne and Charles Tabesh. There will be an emphasis on musicals, apparently, but other genres will be included. Some of the films will have undergone some form of restoration prior to entering the Bluray market, or so I understand.

One of the films being screened is Robert Mulligan‘s To Kill A Mockingbird (’62), which will also be observing its 50th anniversary next year. I noticed this morning that First Run Features will open Mary McDonagh‘s Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & ‘To Kill A Mockiingbird’, a documentary based on her 2010 book “Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird“, on May 6th.

McDonagh’s doc screening at the TCM Classic Film Festival sounds like a cross-promotional no-brainer to me, but a First Run rep said she was unaware of any such plan or notion.

Other TCM Classic Film Festival selections include A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), An American in Paris (1951), Becket (1964), Carousel (1956), Citizen Kane (1941), The Guns of Navarone (1961), La Dolce Vita (1960), Network (1976), Reds (1981), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), Taxi Driver (1976), The Devil is a Woman (1935), The Tingler (1959), West Side Story (1961) and Whistle Down the Wind (1961).

One of my sons said this newly purchased jacket ($45 in a Melrose consignment store) makes me look like a gangbanger. It’s actually a racing-label jacket commemorating Doug Herbert’s 2004 World Tour. If your natural youthful effervescence ain’t what it used to be, it’s okay to supplement with a splash of color here and there.

From a mini-bio: “Dougzilla Herbert is a four-time International Hot Rod Association Top Fuel champion (1992, 1994-96). He won 20 IHRA races, including five of seven events in 1992. Herbert was the first IHRA competitor to run a four-second elapsed time in 1992 at Scribner, Nebraska. He also was the first in IHRA to exceed 300 mph, 1995 at Bristol, Tennessee. In 2004, Herbert embarked on the Dougzilla World Tour and ran 11 slightly different paint schemes in each of the cities he raced.”