We have a guest at the house this week, my friend Charles Chen from Beijing, so he and I have watched some of his old favorites and a movie he’s had trouble finding (Iron Monkey) back home. (For a bonus this week, check out the importance of having a good home video library .)

Now, we are off to show him Mark Twain’s home in Hannibal, so the list is a bit shorter than usual this week. I also suspect that these choices are quite possibly a set of counter-irritants to compensate for Sex and the City. Just a thought.

MOVIE 70

Iron Monkey
(Wo-ping Yuen, Hong Kong, 90 m.)

This is one wild and woolly Hong Kong kung-fu movie about martial arts hero Wong Fei Hong as a boy. He and his daddy go traveling to a province where the outlaw Iron Monkey must save the people, Zorro-style, from hilariously corrupt officials and Ugly Virgins and poisoned Buddha’s Fist blows and totally silly, totally FAST kung-fu fighting. The plot has no apparent meaning, the time-frame is the end of Imperial China, but with British-looking umbrellas and modern briefcases, and the list of good fighters runs up to about seven, including two women, a boy, and two bad guys. Plenty to see! Almost no heavy scenes of repressed soul-searching! Much broken furniture! The Wong Fei Hong character later grew up and turned into a series of Jet Li and Jackie Chan movies. (Don’t blame me for variant spellings for all the names. Pinyin spelling never quite works. I’ve seen the director’s name spelled three ways in just one source.)

MOVIE 69

El Mariachi
(Robert Rodriguez, 1993, 81 m.)

The legendary independent movie made for several thousand dollars (although that low number inevitably drew some dispute) and launched the career of director Robert Rodriguez, who has gone on to Spy Kids and Sin City and being pals with Quentin Tarantino. The movie is a zany south-of-the-border kick, with bizarrely humorous gun battles on open streets in broad daylight and crazy speeded-up and slow motion sequences and just an all-around droll sense of humor. The bad guy is named Moco, which in English is The Snot. This story put some Mexican macho into the singing cowboy story forever. If Gene Autry or Roy Rogers had fallen into this world, he would have been speechless. OK, songless.

MOVIE 68

Man On Fire
(Tony Scott, 2004, 146 m.)

Denzel Washington is John Creasy, a has-been assassin who takes a job guarding Pita (Dakota Fanning), a little girl in Mexico City. Inevitable kidnappings and murders and complications and double-crosses occur. Although Creasy starts out hard-as-nails, Pita wins him over. Then she gets kidnapped and Creasy goes on a warpath that is over-the-top brutal and just misses being creative. All the corrupt players in the proceedings are extremely sorry to have messed with this killer doing what he does best. If you want a blistering action movie to watch, this may be it. The color is excellent, urban and raw. The plot is frightening. The sound track is pretty good. The ending is just a mess.

Nick Otten is assistant director in the Theater Program at Clayton High School and adjunct professor in the graduate Communications MAT Program at Webster University. He consumes vast quantities of books and movies. In his description of Nick's List, he says,  "For every single work, I’ll quickly post a brief commentary — each week, at least 1 book and 2 movies, usually more. Maybe a paragraph, maybe a page. Sometimes, not often, I may go crazy and write some kind of extra, a page or so, on some movie or pair of movies or some genre, actor, or something else, or how one book relates to another or a movie or you or me or us. Such stuff will be just one click away, guaranteed."

To read the previous Nick's List posts click June 9 , June 2 , May 26 , May 19 , May 12,   May 5 , April 28 , April 21 , March .