“A government without newspapers is not an option for America, ” President Obama said last night at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. “We count on you to help us make sense of a complex world [and] we look to you for truth, even if it’s always an approximation. This is the season of renewal and reinvention, which is what journalism is in the process of doing. It’s not short on talent or creativity or passion or creativity or commitment…qualities that certainly prove that journalism’s problems are worth solving.”

“The real question,” N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich wrote this morning, “is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail?

“It’s all a matter of priorities. Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard.

“By all means let’s mock the old mainstream media as they preen and party on in a Washington ballroom. Let’s deplore the tabloid journalism that, like the cockroach, will always be with us. But if a comprehensive array of real news is to be part of the picture as well, the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up.

“Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.”

The Three Days of the Condor Bluray arrives Monday morning, two or three hours before I leave for Kennedy airport. Just barely time to pop it in and watch most of it. It’s probably not going to be visually stunning, but it’ll certainly look “better” than anything that’s come before. I love David Rayfiel‘s dialogue, and I’m telling myself, however illogically, that the sharper visuals will somehow make it sound a tad better. The speakers are Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Max Von Sydow, Cliff Robertson and John Houseman.

Kathy: You…you have a lot of very fine qualities.

Joe Turner: What fine qualities?

Kathy: You have good eyes. Not kind, but they don’t lie, and they don’t look away much, and they don’t miss anything. I could use eyes like that.

Joe Turner: But you’re overdue in Vermont. Is he a tough guy?

Kathy: He’s pretty tough.

Joe Turner: What will he do?

Kathy: Understand, probably.

Joe Turner: Boy. That is tough.

And….

Higgins: Do you miss that kind of action, sir? [referring to joining and working for the CIA during World War II]

Mr. Wabash: No, I miss that kind of clarity.

“Kehr, Dave. Third- or possibly even fourth-string New York Times movie critic. Though often relegated to reviewing DVD releases, he is preferred by Snobs over A. O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden.” — 2005 passage from The Film Snob’s Dictionary. Does Kehr still enjoy said status?

I’ve assembled my four favorite passages from Anthony Lane‘s 5.18 New Yorker review. He follows Variety‘s Todd McCarthy and myself by taking note of James Tiberius Kirk’s mood hair (i.e., veering from dirty blond to blondish red). It’s not a pan, and I wouldn’t agree if it were. But it’s great succulent stuff — the best Lane reviews always are.

Excerpt #1: “This new Star Trek is nonsense, no question (‘Prepare the red matter!’), but at least it’s not boggy nonsense, the way most of the other movies were, and it powers along, unheeding of its own absurdity, with a drive and a confidence that the producers of the original TV series might have smiled upon.”

Excerpt #2: Kirk “is played here by Chris Pine, who struggles with a screenplay, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, that could have been downloaded from a software program entitled ‘Make Your Own Annoying Rebel.’ I thoroughly approved of his bedding an extraterrestrial female with green skin, eco-sex being all the rage two centuries from now, but that is the only downtime afforded by the recklessly rolling plot, although Jim still manages to defy the continuity team and switch hair color from dirty blond to redhead and back again. Don’t worry, he’s still a natural dickhead underneath.”

Excerpt #3: JJ Abrams’s “fondness for the retro is crucial to his non-stop knowingness, with its hints of both hipster and nerd. He gorges on cinema as if it were one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, piling his plate with succulent effects, whether they go together or not. Hence the red ravening beast that pops up on a random planet, clearly left over from the props cupboard of Cloverfield; the man-to-Romulan fistfight borrowed from M:i:3; and, I regret to say, a dose of parallel universe.”

Excerpt #4: “This theme of alternative reality is clumsily worked, and not a patch on its tighter, more alluring, and thus much scarier treatment in Coraline. Its effect here is to saddle us with two Mr. Spocks, one from the vulnerable present and one from the comforting future, and its main purpose, I suspect, is to drag in Leonard Nimoy, who these days makes Bela Lugosi look like Zac Efron, and thus insure that all the Star Trek scholars in the audience will have to hurry home and change their underwear.”

I’m presuming, naturally, that several HE regulars were among last night’s Star Trek viewers, and that given the 96% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating some are focusing on aspects of the film they weren’t entirely satisfied with. Because it’s more fun to be contrarian. Not to dump on the film (which I liked), but that’s where the percolation is right now.

You might want to read Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review as a starting-off thing. Ignore it, debate it or join the praisers but please add something specific. Comments that just say “I liked it” or “it sucked” will be immediately deleted.

It took in $26 million yesterday for a cume of $33 million if you count Thursday night, which of course you must. Steve Mason says it could hit $75 to $77 million by Sunday night and bank over $200 million by the end of the run.

Here’s a public shout-out for Santa Barbara Film festival chief Roger Durling and all his regional friends and colleagues, hoping that they’re not feeling too freaked out and that their homes are still standing as they stare at those massive Armageddon fire clouds caused by the Jesusita inferno, which has been raging for four days now. Sea valiente, sea fuerte y confianza en dios.

“Fire officials have more than doubled their estimate of how many acres have burned in the Jesusita wildfire [that’s been] raging along mountain slopes above Santa Barbara,” says an AP story that was filed around midnight.

“The Department of Forestry and Fire Protection says new aircraft tracking shows the fire has burned 8,600 acres. Earlier on Friday, officials estimated the 4-day-old blaze had burned 3,500 acres. Fire spokesman Dennis Mathisen says the [previous] smaller estimate was based on firefighters surveying the blaze at night from the ground. The new acreage count was taken by aircraft during the day.”

Here are some relatively recent reports from the Santa Barbara News Press.

Some 13,500 people have either evacuated or been asked to evacuate so far. Some 5400 homes have been “engulfed,” according to a CNN summary. (I don’t think “engulfed” means burned to the ground.) The wind-driven inferno has been described as “uncontrolled.” Well, obviously.

New Yorker photograph by Charles Minsky

There’s a well-observed piece by Lila Byock on the New Yorker site, called “American Pompeii.”

“I had thoughts of Pompeii just now, looking at an abandoned car dealer’s lot, as ash poured down. Everything was deserted, except for people fleeing towards the freeway. Ash pouring, pouring down, hurting the eyes.

“We just snuck back into the evac zones to get more stuff from Tonya’s place. We were safe the whole time, but fire is right over the hill — ALL over the ridge — and this stretch of the city where Tonya lives, where we have sushi and coffee sometimes, is blocked off by cop cars and barriers, utterly black, thousands of homes empty and evacuated. A sky so totally black and ash-covered that you’d think there’s a volcano blowing up. It’s still about 100 degrees here and we’re breathing people’s cars and houses right now.”

The collapsing Eiffel Tower scene starts to make it, almost makes it…and then doesn’t. That green metal-melting effect is crap, and they don’t show the tower crashing full force into the bridge. (They cut just as it hits.) It generally looks a little too CG. Sorry, guys.

I spoke earlier today with Outrage director Kirby Dick. The Magnolia film is opening in several cities today. We discussed the film, of course, and my admiration for Dick’s direct, sharply-honed cutting style. And the recent bizarre confrontation between political blogger Michael Rogers, one of the principal talking heads in Dick’s documentary, and Washington, D.C.-based talk show host Doug Mckleway , of Channel 8’s “Let’s Talk Live!”

Kirby Dick following the first Tribeca Film Festival screening of Outrage.

Dick’s aim, I wrote in my recent review, “is to expose a bizarre psychology on the part of closeted politicians who’ve voted against gay civil rights as a way of suppressing their own issues.

“Bluntly and unambiguously and without any dicking around, Outrage names names. Dick seems to have done his homework; you can sense discipline and exactitude and what seems like solid sourcing all through it. I came away convinced that it’s better to look at this tendency frankly and plainly than to just let it fester.

“I still feel opposed to personally outing anyone, but Dick’s motive is clearly to let air and sunlight into a series of Washington, D.C. situations that have been about shadows for too long. That’s what kept hitting me over and over as I watched — i.e., that Outrage is doing a fine job of persuading me that it’s all about telling the truth. I believed it, I believed it, I believed it.”

I caught the B’way production of Eugene O’Neil’s Desire Under The Elms last night, and was 90% floored. For me, Carla Gugino‘s Abbie seems like a revelation because she’s never had a role as searing in a film. She’s eye-popping, breathtaking. I know she has a fair amount of stage experience but it still felt like one of those “where did this come from?” performances.

Carla Gugino, Pablo Schreiber.

Actors are generally ill-served by Hollywood in that their the roles often seem limited and familiar, and the kind of acting they’re asked to deliver is limited and familiar. A good Broadway play, however, lets them expand their souls and really rip into things and show what they’re made of. This is what’s happened between Gugino and O’Neil and director Robert Falls.

Gugino has been fine in numerous films (I especially liked her in American Gangster ) but she’s awesome in Desire — on fire, earthy, heavy-breathing, planted, a backbone of iron. I feel as if I’ve seen her work for the first time. I’ve told the show’s publicist I’d like to interview her before leaving for France on Monday…silence. Whatever.

The play, I’ve read, began as part of an O’Neil series at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. The amazing production design is by Walt Spangler. Gugino’s costars are Pablo Schreiber, Brian Dennehy, Boris McGiver and Daniel Stewart. McGiver and Stewart’s performances as a couple of grimy and smelly Clem Kadiddlehopper work animals seemed too broad. I kept wishing they would get off the stage, which is why I said my reaction was 90% positive.