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.”

Awards Daily ‘s Sasha Stone and myself all alone this time, talking about Limitless, The Beaver, Sucker Punch, France, beaters, the shortfalling of The Lincoln Lawyer and so on. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link. (Sorry for the underlying feedback hum sound.)

HOT GOTHY GRRLZ skimpy-hot outfits Matrix-y parallel dream world slowmo bullet-time plus shakycam catering to ComicCon fanboyz emo goth kids wake me shake me.

As I understand it, The Lincoln Lawyer came in fourth this weekend, earning $13,400,000 in 2707 theatres, for two Matthew McConaughey reasons. One, he sells tickets only to female fans of his crappy romcom movies. And two, he has zero cred with those who like semi-serious, relatively well-made films. The second group may have known about Lawyer‘s good reviews, but they probably said, “Yeah, okay….Netflix.”

Two days ago Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan asked some people if McConaughey can make the transition from romantic-comedy and Surfer Dude crap to more substantial films.

The Lincoln Lawyer is “pulp, for sure, but it’s the most compelling McConaughey has been in years,” he wrote. “[So] it’s possible, with Lincoln Lawyer, Dallas Buyer’s Club, and a reunion with his Dazed and Confused director Richard Linklater (in the dark comedy Bernie) on the way, that Hollywood’s most famous beach bum has finally put on a suit and grown up.”