THE HIGH HAT | NITRATE

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.
by George Wu

Special Feature: Sam Peckinpah
- Introduction
  Welcome to The High Hat’s Sam Peckinpah feature.
  by Hayden Childs
- 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.
  by Gary Mairs
- 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.
  by Tom Block
- Major Dundee
  Moby Dick tells us that pursuing your obsessions can destroy you; Peckinpah should have been more wary.
  by Hayden Childs
- Algonquin Kids’ Table: The Wild Bunch
  In which various participants gush and squibble over Peckinpah’s classic tale of bad men in bad times.
- 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.
  by Dana Knowles
- Junior Bonner
  The Tao of Sam Peckinpah.
  by Hayden Childs
- 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.
  by Tom Block
- 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.
  by Phil Nugent
- The Bottom Shelf: Convoy
  It was as if Stanley Kubrick had decided to follow Barry Lyndon with a lavish adaptation of “Disco Duck.”
  by Scott Von Doviak
- 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.
  by Leonard Pierce
- Pick a Peck of Poses
  A Beginner’s Field Guide to the Peckinpah Actor.
  by Phil Nugent

Issue One …