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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
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