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I knew that my inability to access Twitter this morning wasn’t my own technical fault due to password problems or some other technical horseshit obstruction.

“We intend to charge for all our news websites,” New Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch has officially said in so many words, adding his belief that “if we are successful, we will be followed by other media.” Murdoch owns the New York Post and Wall Street Journal as well as the London Times and Sun newspapers in England.

So what kind of weekly or monthly fees will average news junkies like myself have to pay in order to stay high and informed once all the major news providers start charging? What will it come to in order to read the major print outlets that can’t cut it unless they start charging? In the ’90s a typical Manhattan news hound used to buy the four NYC dailies plus the Voice and the N.Y. Observer and New York magazine and whatever else. Which came to $35 per week and $140 per month…something like that.

What would the estimated cost be in today’s economy? I’m afraid that once all the big news orgs jump on the Murdoch bandwagon that it may come to something like…I don’t know, $250 or $300 a month? More?

Yesterday’s “Argument Over Beers” piece sure stirred things up. I was rather proud of the precision and clarity in the piece as it was well written in both a structural and an expressive sense. But I didn’t quite get it right when I tried to elaborate on the notion that the world would be a much better place if the philosophical, temperamental and romantic individualism that is the bedrock platform of conservativism (a.k.a. “take care of yourself and leave me alone to do whatever the hell I want” selfishness) could be somehow eradicated.

To make my point in my usual impudent, button-pushing, excite-the-opposition fashion I lightheartedly used terms like “exterminate” and “green re-education camps.” I knew this would anger people, which of course it did. But it also brought on a response from hordes of literal-minded righties accusing me of being literal-minded myself.

So let’s try it again with a lighter touch and a bit more metaphor. If I could eliminate righties from the face of the earth easily, painlessly and un-traumatically, without being inhumane or upsetting anyone’s apple cart or having to deal with the unfortunate echoes of the policies of Pol Pot, Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, I would. If I could, say, clap my hands three times and be done with them all, or — here’s a more positivist, life-embracing approach — magically transform them into whatever the polar opposites of Rep. Michelle Bachman or Rush Limbaugh or Rep. John Boehner or Phil Gramm or Joe Cassano might be, I would do so without a moment’s hesitation.

Because such an act would unquestionably pave the way toward a better, kinder, more humanistic, less corporatized and more European-styled world with all kinds of global cool-down policies and universal health care for all and everyone eating healthy foods and driving Priuses. Okay, we all like burgers and sips of Jack Daniels and McDonalds fries but corporatized junk food would be largely eliminated.

As I’ve said time and again I genuinely like guys like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone and all the other right-wing icons in action movies (except for Chuck Norris), and I deeply admire the character of various conservative guys I’ve personally known and had business dealings with (Eastwood and Matt Drudge included). But there’s just no more room for pugnacious conservative naysayers in today’s world — they’re just saying “no” in order to say no and getting in the way. Mass personality transplant operations would be impossible so I don’t know what to suggest.

Reply: “They know what they like.” Counter-reply: “If they knew what they like they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh.”

Denied advance press-screening access (like everyone else) to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Variety has enlisted Aussie staffer/stringer Richard Kuipers to write a review off a screening at the Birch Carroll & Coyle Myer Center Cinemas in Brisbane. But Kuipers’ reactions seem, by my sights and expectations, overly moderate.

A super-sized $175 million CG movie that Paramount refuses to screen for any press whatsoever must be seriously flawed from not only a critical perspective but, one would think, from the easy-lay standards of Joe Popcorn. At the very least a film of this type warrants a little John Anderson sarcasm or some Todd McCarthy-esque haute disdain. But all Kuipers can muster is a few wan laments.

He says that Stephen Sommers‘ film plays “more like a highlights reel from an established franchise than a movie intended to launch it” and that it “interrupts its barrage of CGI action for only the barest minimum of anything resembling character development.” Let me explain something. People like myself want to see tough critics ripping Sommers’ lungs out here. We want razor-tipped savagery. We want intestines and other internal organs splattered all over on the floor.

Kuipers says the film is “edited as if the audience wouldn’t watch unless every scene were switched to overdrive” and that the “not-bad basic plot never gets much of a chance to be anything more.” He also complains about “uninspired flashbacks to the characters’ pasts [arriving] like commercial breaks slotted into what seems to one long setpiece.”

Okay, I get it, fine. I’m sure Kuipers is expressing his reservations as plainly and comprehensively as he knows how. Now can we have some fun here?

There’s a passage in John Horn‘s recently-posted L.A. Times story about The Hurt Locker that made me extremely angry. “For all of the film’s early commercial and critical achievements,” he writes, “Summit now faces a Hurt Locker test nearly as tricky as the film’s central theme of disabling Iraqi improvised explosive devices. Younger moviegoers are not flocking to the film, which could limit its ticket sales.”

Excuse me? The Young and the Empty are paying to see big-studio CG crap but they’re steering clear of a genuinely cool, gripping and seriously thrilling film that is unquestionably among the year’s best and which runs circles around the filmmaking chops of Michael Bay and Stephen Sommers? And the youth of the nation can’t be bothered? There’s really and truly something wrong with these guys, honest to God. A deficiency in their souls.

Budd Schulberg, the morally-enraged writer who died Wednesday, knew fame and fortune and serious respect during his 95 years on the planet. But the praise that came his way tonight in numerous obituaries was primarily a tribute to three movies and one televised drama that were seen and praised during a five-year streak in the mid to late 1950s.

All four works were basically about social inequity and the unfairness of things in the rough and tumble of big-city commerce. They were each about powerful and ruthless people screwing over less powerful, more decent-minded colleagues or employees, and about the necessity of these lesser types taking a stand against evil and exploitation.

First was On The Waterfront (’54), the Oscar-winning feature that we all know about. Then came The Harder They Fall (’56), a Humphrey Bogart-Rod Steiger drama about the corruption of boxing that was allegedly based on the rise and fall of Primo Carnera. And then A Face in the Crowd (’57), about the rise and fall of a part folksy, part malicious and power-mad Will Rogers figure named Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith). And finally the 1959 NBC Sunday Showcase presentation of What Makes Sammy Run?, which Schulberg had originally written in 1941 or thereabouts. The ’59 telecast starred Larry Blyden, John Forsythe and Barbara Rush.

Schulberg did a lot and wrote a lot but these four works were the core. They were all toughly and believably written, and focused on desperate, morally vague, sometimes conniving people up against the wall and facing hard ethical situations and decisions.

I’ll always have a soft spot for Waterfront, but that’s primarily about Marlon Brando‘s legendary performance as Terry Malloy. I’m not sure if my second favorite is A Face in a Crowd or What Makes Sammy Run? Come to think of it, who gives a shit what my second favorite Schulberg work is? Even I don’t care. I do know I’ve watched them all on DVD (I recently bought a DVD of an old Sammy kinescope), and that none to this day sound or feel rickety.

Here’s to a tough guy who had a brief but great run, and who — let’s face it — basically coasted on the reputation of those four works for the rest of his life.

Jett just filed a lively story about Passion Pit, the Cambridge-based rock band, playing a slammin’ hot set this afternoon inside MTV’s Times Square offices on the 24th floor.

Was it low ratings or embarassment over content that prompted Disney’s AMC Media Productions to pull the plug on At The Movies co-hosts Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz? I’d like to know the facts and hear all the inside-dirt theories over the coming hours.

My guess is that it was 70% ratings and 30% embarassment over Lyons, whose imprecise and overly generous reviews of too many crap-level films attracted most of the criticism directed at the show. Mankiewicz wasn’t too bad by comparison. Tough deal. If I were Lyons I would issue a statement saying “I’d like to apologize to Ben Mankiewicz for taking him over the side with me.”

The new replacements are newspaper critics Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and A.O. Scott of the New York Times. I’m not sure what their chemistry will be like or whether they’ll disagree very much — they have similar mild-mannered personalities — but thank God for the return of sophistication, film knowledge and all that good brainy stuff to the show, which had its glory days with Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel back in the ’80s and ’90s.

With Variety‘s Michael Fleming having reported that the wise and perceptive Tom Hanks has decided against playing Elwood P. Dowd in Steven Spielberg‘s Harvey remake, Movieline‘s Kyle Buchanan is predicting that Will Smith will probably snap it up.

But if Smith knows what’s good for him, he won’t. He needs to (a) man up and stop trying to be likable/charming/ingratiating all the time, (b) never commit on-screen suicide with lethal jellyfish ever again, and (c) realize that Spielberg is starting to be over and do the old downhill side. I’m pledging right now that if Smith turns Spielberg down he’ll get a 12-month goodwill pass from Hollywood Elsewhere. Okay, 18 months.

The word needs to go out to all the agencies — turn Spielberg down if he comes calling with the Harvey role! The ideal thing would be Spielberg re-experiencing what George McGovern went through in ’72 when he offered the vice-presidential slot to just about everyone after Thomas Eagleton was zotzed off the ticket. Can the Harvey project be nipped in the bud? It’s won’t be a catastrophe if it gets made. I’ll live, nobody will get sick, etc. But it does seem like such a rotten idea.

“Beyond the mail delays and the botched orders, the lack of human interaction is the big problem with Netflix and its cyber-ilk. Thanks to the Internet, we can now do nearly everything — working, shopping, moviegoing, social networking, having sex — on one machine at home. We’re becoming a society of shut-ins. We deprive ourselves of exercise, even if it’s just a stroll around the mall, until we’re the shape of those blobby people in WALL*E. And we deny ourselves the random epiphanies of human contact.” — from Richard Corliss‘s 8.10 Time essay, “Why Netflix Stinks: A Critic’s Complaint.”