Lost In Translation
While touted in some reviews as a Brief Encounter-like romance, Lost in Translation is much more than that, including an examination of aging — the confusion met upon reaching adulthood, the staleness of married life and the aloofness of being past your prime.

Special Feature: Sam Peckinpah

Introduction
Welcome to The High Hat’s Sam Peckinpah feature.
Looks That Kill
What is unique to Peckinpah is the distribution of these points of identification. Rather than focusing on the protagonists alone, the audience is encouraged also to witness the action from the perspectives of horrified onlookers and victims of crossfire.
Ride the High Country
A film of abundant visual beauty, it’s also a highly literate one through whose heart blows a chill valedictory breeze.
Major Dundee
Moby Dick tells us that pursuing your obsessions can destroy you; Peckinpah should have been more wary.
Straw Dogs
If Peckinpah truly wanted to make Death Wish, he’d have made Death Wish. But Straw Dogs isn’t a vengeance orgy at all unless you’re not quite paying attention.
Junior Bonner
The Tao of Sam Peckinpah.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
The very title suggests a brace of opposing forces, an either/or that needs sorting out, but it’s a riddle that Peckinpah, even had he been sober and left to his own devices, had no intention of solving because he knew it couldn’t be done.
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
There’s no heroic scale, little beauty, and the tenderest relationship is between a man who’s dead and one who ought to be. All that’s left is a vein of black humor a mile thick and a feeling of disgusted rage potent enough to blow you across the room.
The Bottom Shelf: Convoy
It was as if Stanley Kubrick had decided to follow Barry Lyndon with a lavish adaptation of “Disco Duck.”
The Osterman Weekend
Peckinpah was always a foe of received wisdom, and this is why: The Osterman Weekend isn’t a terrible movie. It’s not even a bad movie. It’s certainly not a great movie, but its status as the movie that literally and figuratively buried him is entirely unjust.
Pick a Peck of Poses
A Beginner’s Field Guide to the Peckinpah Actor.

The Algonquin Kids’ Table

This Issue: The Wild Bunch

Setting the Table:
Most of the contributors to The High Hat first met gathered around that 21st century oracle, l’Internet. More specifically, in one or more of the various message boards that make up some of the many curious, quaint little villages to be found along the Information Superhighway (and what a strange, pothole-ridden, wreckage-dusted stretch of road that’s proven to be, eh?). Message boards are funny little entities (as anyone with even a passing acquaintance with them — which is probably most of our readership — can attest). At their worst, they are mere repositories for frustrated, lonely miscreants to toss vile, misspelled imprecations and obscene emoticons at one another, safely carrying on virtual class(less) warfare from behind a firewall of faceless anonymity. At their best, however — and herein lies their insidious, addictive power — they can be vibrant party lines where some of the finest, wittiest and most articulate individuals you could ever hope to meet (not that you wind up meeting most of them) come together to exchange information, opinion and one-liners, as educational, entertaining and ultimately life-enriching an experience as anyone can imagine. (At least anyone who spends far too much time staring at a monitor every day. And never mind that the frustrated, lonely miscreants and the fine, witty and articulate individuals are occasionally the same people.) The group assembled on this online spot are, we think you’ll agree, highly skilled at composing discrete pieces, reviews and interviews, the usual staples of this kind of enterprise. But throw them into the fast-paced, give-and-take environs of a message board and you wind up with something unique that even the best-written articles can’t quite approximate. The Algonquin Kids’ Table is an attempt to capture some of that flavor, albeit in slightly more sterile surroundings. An experiment, in other words. And as such, it might fail miserably. It will be regularly updated, but not quite in real time; a venue for more personal and casual conversation than usual, but still subject to (hopefully minor, if any) editing; a fairly freewheeling arena with, as yet, a very small guest list. All of which could conceivably kill off what makes that particular form of movable verbal feast often so sumptous. But we figure it’s worth a shot. It’s something to do. Hey, how much did you pay to get in here, anyway?

“ If I could change a single thing about The Wild Bunch, I'd end it with an flashback, not to the Mexican village, but the walk.”
-------------------->Page One of the Wild Bunch discussion!

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