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.”

You need to wait until 2:30 for the good stuff: “One of the reasons nothing gets done is that one of the political parties puts much more into fantasy problems that real ones.”

I finally sat down and watched the Almost Famous Bootleg Bluray, and it hasn’t diminished a bit since I last caught it on DVD. What a seriously great (and unfortunately unseen, for the most part) rock ‘n’ roll heart movie. Chock-full of sly, luscious, lived-in performances, led by Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘s great Lester Bangs and, on the sub-supporting level, Jimmy Fallon‘s road manager.

And I’d completely forgotten that Rainn Wilson (33 when it was shot in ’99) and Jay Baruchel (17 during filming) had significant small roles. And I was reminded once again by Kate Hudson’s just-about-perfect performance as Penny Lane career what a quarter-inc-deep tragedy her career has been since.

Fallon: “‘Cause if you think Mick Jagger is still gonna be out there trying to be a rock star at age 50, you’re sadly, sadly mistaken.”

Here’s hoping again that We Bought A Zoo, the currently rolling feature from Almost Famous director-writer Cameron Crowe, pans out.

Jennifer Lawrence will play the feisty and combative Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games! Which will be directed by Gary Ross! Every last site, it seems, has been reporting, repeating and re-phrasing this announcement as if it…meant something. Why is always left to me to call a spade a spade with these things, or least throw in some perspective?

Hunger Games: The Movie will almost certainly be an acceptably mid-level romantic dystopian Rollerball action melodrama by way of Death Race 2000, Logan’s Run, The Running Man, Battle Royale and The Long Walk. It’ll be the same ritualistic, hazily-motivated crap, tailor-made for young sensation junkies and the don’t-know-any-betters. It’ll be nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing…nothing.

Yes, it’ll probably make good money and might even become a three-picture franchise, but when have those things ever mattered in the great scheme? It shoots in the spring and comes out on 3.23.12.

I recently ordered a DVD of a flagrantly bad film — Roger Vadim‘s Pretty Maids All In A Row (’71) — just so I could check out a brief, nothing-special nude scene with Angie Dickinson, who’ll turn 80 later this year. Dickinson au natural is why I also own Big Bad Mama (’74) — another stinker. Dickinson was never much of an actress. And she only made two good films in her life, Rio Bravo and Point Blank.

The guy with Dickinson in this scene from Pretty Maids All In A Row is the late John David Carson. She was 40 when this film came out, and looked, at the oldest, like she was 32 or 33.

I’m not proud of this but at least I’m being honest. It feels a little bit weird that I’m confessing to the same Dickinson longing that Dominic Chianese‘s Corrado Soprano spoke of two or three times on The Sopranos, but I might as well cop to it.