This week in the New York Times, a look at the latest distinguished batch of titles in the “Fox Film Noir” collection — none of which fit my personal, highly subjective definition of noir, but all of which I’m glad to have in print.

And if you haven’t seen this incredible fan-made tribute to Joe Dante’s classic “Gremlins 2,” have a look.  Somebody made this in a basement!

This week in the New York Times, a handsome new box set of Errol Flynn westerns is a forceful reminder of the role Flynn played in re-establishing the A western in the 1940s. And William Keighly’s overlooked “Rocky Mountian” turns out to be a nice surprise — a compact little actioner that suggests a Sam Fuller war movie or a Budd Boetticher chamber western, full of stunning, noir-inflected landscape work by the great cinematographer Ted McCord. But where is Raoul Walsh’s very fine 1948 “Silver River”?

Not that I’m eager to attract all the Batboys back to the board, but Larry Kart has sent in an interesting post on “The Dark Knight” that deserves better than being buried at the end of that painfully long thread:

Lord knows this party is over, but I’m surprised, now that I’ve seen TDK, that no one (or virtually no one) has mentioned what to me is clearly the most expressive (as in “oppressive”) aspect of the movie: The swooping, “circle the principals” camera work and the similarly obtrusive, “Look schmuck, this is linked to that!” editing, all of which is designed to give the film an air of perpetual stress and emergency, as well as to reassure both the audience and the studio heads that one is seeing much money being well spent in ways that are designed to allow no room for any response by the audience that deviates from a stress-and-emergency state of being. (These latter two points may in effect be one: What better proof that the air of stress and emergency is in some fundamental sense “real” within the context of the film-making than to display one’s ability and willingness to blow up, say, an entire genuine hospital (or to convincingly simulate that event; it amounts to the same thing, an act of weight and stature; if they took the trouble to do this … well, it’s like being faced with a large angry man-like being with flexed muscles and gritted teeth). Of course, with that allusion to the elderly godfathers of all this, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, some of you may be thinking that I’m erasing all distinctions here; and in one sense I am. This genre of perpetual stress and emergency is deeply, pervasively political in the sense that its emotional atmosphere for the viewer is meant to be one of near-perpetual stimulation and stress and observed purposeful (and thus increasingly familiar and acceptable to us) rage. The possible grace note in TDK is Ledger’s Joker, but I find him to be anything but that — sure, his character says all sorts of stuff about playfulness and chaos, but what we see him do time after time is plan things much more carefully and effectively than anyone else. In this, jumping back to my sense of the two related but different audiences for such films — ourselves in the theater, and the men and women who actually bankrolled the film — the needs of both those audiences are at once tickled and complacently, smugly diddled by the Joker’s behavior. Massive effort, massive effects, massive strength, all with their due impact, and the show still goes on — a damn miracle it is that the puppet-show “evil” we’ve dreamed up has that much life in it. Another sequel, please; the emergency continues. As for specific political policies being evoked and/or endorsed in such films, as I believe Dave said above, it’s pretty much a smorgasbord. Once you enter the building, under those conditions and are in some sense hungry, it doesn’t matter much whether you’re grabbing at the herring or the egg salad and stepping on someone’s face (or worse) in order to do so. The point is that you’ve accepted that atmosphere and are building a fiction that itself attempts to make that atmosphere pervasive.

Best, Larry

As an aside, I’d just note that the “circle the principals” move Larry describes has become as ubiquitous in contemporary films as the zooms of the 1970s – to me, it’s just another sign of lazy direction, like Altman’s slow zooms in on a single figure in one of his clothesline ‘scope compositions. You see it in romantic comedies as well as action films. The other night I was watching a tiny Poverty Row picture – “A Shot in the Dark,” directed by Charles Lamont for Chesterfield (1935), and at the moment one character tells another that an apparent suicide was anything but, Lamont dollies about 90 degrees around the latter, just enough to suggest that something fundamental in his view of/relation to the world has changed. In this context, it’s an expressive, even subtle device – but a whole film shot that way expresses nothing more than the director’s lack of confidence in his own material, his gnawing need to “punch things up” and “keep things moving” for today’s restive audiences.

My sense for some time has been that the two principal emotions expressed by Hollywood films are anger and self-pity, both of which are spectacularly on display in “The Dark Knight.”

Criterion has released Larisa Shepitko’s two best-known films, “Wings” (1966, above) and “The Ascent” (1977), on the company’s no-frills Eclipse label, and they remain stunning fragments from a career that never was — Shepitko died in a car accident at the age of 40. Seen again, they bear a closer resemblance to the work of her near contemporary Andrei Tarkovksy than I remembered: the first time around, for example, I missed Anatoli Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky’s favorite actor and the lead in “Andrei Rublov,” playing the diabolical German collaborator in “The Ascent.” More musings in the New York Times.

Manny Farber has died at the age of 91. J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum have fine appreciations.  Carrie Rickey, who studied with Farber, has posted her appreciation here.

Was Reginald Barker a great director? So much of his work has been lost that we’ll probably never know, but on the limited basis of “The Wrath of the Gods” (1914), “The Coward” (1915), “Civilization” (1916) and now, the excellent new edition of “The Italian” (1915) from Flicker Alley, there’s plenty of evidence that he was a formal innovator of considerable talent, who advanced the art significantly during the first years of the feature film. The Flicker Alley disc, “Perils of the New Land,” also contains George Leone Tucker’s interesting but artless “Traffic in Souls,” one of the very first American features (1913) and a selection of Edison shorts centered on New York City and its police department, turned out in tunics and armed with billy clubs. Further details here.

This week in my New York Times column I contemplate the casual pleasures of Enzo Castellari’s 1978 “The Inglorious Bastards,” an enterprising Italian knock-off of “The Dirty Dozen” that Quentin Tarantino intends to remake (though very loosely, if the script purloined by New York Magazine is an authentic one). The popular Italian cinema of the 60s and 70s has long been overshadowed by the many distinguished art house films that came out of that country during the same tumultuous period, but there also seems to be much of value to be uncovered here. After all, the Italians raised the only real challenge to Hollywood’s dominance of popular entertainment (in the west, at least) since the French studios were crushed by World War I — and for that alone, you’ve got to love them.

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment keeps coming up with beautifully produced box sets drawn from their extensive library, and today’s release of “The Tyrone Power Matinee Idol Collection” is no exception. There aren’t any major discoveries among the ten (!) impeccably transferred titles, although there is a minor one: “I’ll Never Forget You,” Roy Ward Baker’s oddball, 1951 remake of “Berkeley Square” with an injection of atom age anxiety (and its long unavailable Technicolor sequences restored). Most of the set concentrates on the kind of bread-and-butter star vehicles that constituted the greater part of any studio’s production during the classical era, and it is fascinating to see the evidence for a Fox “house style” that emerges from minor efforts like Edward H. Griffith’s “Cafe Metropole” (failed Lubitsch) and Tay Garnett’s “Love Is News” (failed Hawks). But constant throughout are the huge, carefully detailed sets and the distinctively wide tonal range of the cinematography, which ranges from inky blacks (the sort carefully avoided by MGM and Paramount) to celestial whites (every time Power uncorks that smile).

Sad news from Cairo where Youssef Chahine has passed on at the age of 82. Jo, as he was known to almost everyone who crossed his path, was a warm, delightful individual and an endlessly inventive filmmaker, whose unpredictable mixture of styles and tones remains one of the best arguments I know for an anti-theoretical, “impure” cinema. He worked in practically every genre known to man, from the historical epic to the personal testament, though I suspect he loved the mad world of Egyptian melodrama the best. A.O. Scott has a nice obituary in today’s Times, and Richard Pena has alerted me to a Chahine discussion board, here. Only half a dozen (and not necessarily the best) of Chahine’s more than forty feature films are available on DVD; it’s criminal that no one has come out with, at least, “Central Station,” the 1958 film that brought Chahine to European attention. It’s a classic noir with an Arab twist, starring Chahine himself as a handicapped newspaper peddler hopelessly in love with the sultry lemonade seller (Hind Rostom) who works with him at the main Cairo train station. And there are many, many more where it came from . . .

Two very different horror movies, released within a few months of each other:  Karl Freund’s austere, minimalist “The Mummy” and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s unrestrainedly experimental “Vampyr,” considered here in the New York Times.

“The reactionary . . . is likely to start from a profound conviction of the evil of the natural man.  Instead of worrying because people do not get enough freedom, he is obsessed by the need for police — authority, discipline, order.  How else can you keep the Devil under control?”

Edmund Wilson on Joseph de Maistre, 1932

“The Dark Knight” is “Dirty Harry” stripped of Don Siegel’s ambivalence and ambiguity.  Here again, one madman (Christian Bale’s Batman/Clint Eastwood’s Harry) is posited as the only effective way of combating another (Heath Ledger’s Joker/Andy Robinson’s Scorpio).  The two figures are identified as morally equivalent (”You complete me,” says Ledger to Bale, nastily referencing “Jerry Maguire”), but where Siegel’s camera literally recoils in horror at the moment Harry leaps into madness (when he steps on Scorpio’s wound in the football stadium), Nolan seems to embrace, and even romanticize, his hero’s obsessive, abusive behavior.  Is the Dark Knight just George Bush with a better outfit, demanding that he be allowed all of the available “tools” to combat terrorism, even if they include torture and eavesdropping?   Like Bush, Batman has his own warantless wiretapping program, but Nolan is kind enough to assure us that, once his goal is accomplished, the superhero will blow it up.  Is he suggesting that we can count on the Dark President to do the same?

UPDATE:  The Wall Street Journal concurs, and is down with it: “A paen of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.”