I barely remember how to do this. Anyway, life/busy/stuff is keeping me elsewhere for the time being. However, I must unabashedly recommend Children of Men. This movie, this movie, this movie. The imagery was gorgeous, smart-alecky Christ-story, but the story itself, a near-primeval mythographic story about the trip through hell to deliver the pregnant woman who will save humanity into the hands of safety, resonated throughout me as though I were a bell being struck. The world it takes place in, a future England that is like Iraq as the last outpost of civilization (rather than the cradle), is a horrific vision of xenophobia, homeland security, the breakdown of government functions (see the trash strewn everywhere), terrorist factions, and authoritarian crackdowns. The message was crystal clear and as old as, well, the story: what is coming will seem like the end of everything, but there's always room for hope. The movie's verisimilitude is so raw that you'll find yourself gasping at the end of the action sequences (two, prominently, are single-takes, which is a wow of a realization), unaware that you'd been holding your breath. I wept and I laughed, and the movie still has a hold on me, days later.

As better said by Leonard Pierce:

So, you though we were done, huh? You thought we'd quit? You thought our widely celebrated and lethally well-timed Robert Altman issue (#7 of the High Hat) was all you were going to get out of us this season?

Nah. Nah. We don't dance no mo' at the High Hat. We're right back up in your business with a specially supplemental issue #7.5, where ten of our sexiest contributors expound on ten of their favorite cultural thingamadoos of 2006.

Simply by pointing your browser thisaway, you'll get:

• Founder & editor Hayden Childs on ten things you should have paid attention to this year.
• Composer & classical music blogger Steve Hicken on ten significant developments in concert music.
• Film prof and High Hat editor Gary Mairs on ten of YouTube's finest.
• Writer, editor and literary gal about town Shauna McKenna on the ten best websites for fiction.
• Cartoonist and raconteur "Calamity" Jon Morris on the ten best -- and worst -- superhero comics of the year.
• Writer, thinker and author of "Against Polemics" David Nordstrom on the year's essential films and DVDs.
• Semi-professional arbiter of everything Phil Nugent tells us what movies made it okay to laugh again.
• Blogger, High Hat editor and freelance what-have-you Leonard Pierce on
  the year's best bests.
• Film critic and America's movie janitor Scott Von Doviak on the year's worst worsts.
• Culture vulture and movie death match referee George Wu on what he was watching in 2006.

Please take a moment from your busy schedules to use your spare eyeballs and brain cells on the latest offering from what we like to think is one of the more consistently snappy journals of arts and cultural criticism on this big truck called the internet, won't you? And stay tuned; issue #8 will be coming your way this February. (We're also still taking pitches for the next issue; contact us at highhatsubmissions at gmail dot com if you're interested.)

Our Robert Altman issue was one of the best yet, thanks to the hard work of our editors and some amazing contributions from our always-excellent writers. We're getting a higher profile with every edition, and we have you to thank for that. As always, we appreciate your support and kindness.