Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.

More often than not, I find myself hopelessly out of touch with current development of events. Worse still, I occasionally feel that I could not catch up with the pace with how things are advancing at its speedy pace. Just the other day, someone talked about Lady Gaga's heavily rotated hit single "Pokerface" while I could only recall Tiffany's "I Think We Are Alone Now' from the 80s in terms of catchiness. Incidentally, "pokerface" was also a name an ex-gf called me when we broke up.

Sam Peckinpah (1925 – 1984)'s The Wild Bunch (1969) dealt with a bunch of outlaws trying to cope with the closing of the gunslingers, wild wild west era and modernisation of the society as the 20th Century began. Starring the late William Holden (1918 – 1981) and Ernest Borgnine, amongst others, the film was as violent as it could gets. Like any of Peckinpah's spaghetti western genre films, the characters and actors were, well, real men of yesteryear who were gruff, tough with skins looking like pre-tanned wrinkly leather, definitely unlike the majority of the 21st millennium metrosexualised, poofed up boytors. The film is also acclaimed for its groundbreaking usage of slo-mo, intricate, multi-angle editing. All I see are lots of dusts and bloods. The climatic showdown is the highlight of the entire movie in my opinion. The aging outlaws, suffering from sudden conscience, decided to avenge one their gang members death by taking on an entire rogue-ish oily looking Mexican garrison at their base. They all died obviously but not before ensuring that not even a single Mexican soldier is alive.