Have a friend in from Montana, and it's raining buckets here, so after getting thoroughly soaked in Harlem this morning we headed to the movies. Tsui Hark is one of the all time great action movie directors, and Judge Dee (renamed Detective Dee for the western market) is a classic Chinese character, as it were, so I've been looking forward to this movie since it was first announced. Plus, the fights were choreographed by my man Sammo Hung. Gotta tell ya, some of the fight scenes are little long (enough already) and the long-shot animation is obviously animation, but those are small quibbles. It's terrific. Tsui is such a master of action movies that the rhythm never falters, which was a problem for me in Ang Lee's CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: I loved it, but action movies aren't his specialty, so I sometimes felt that the problem wasn't that it was over the top, but that it was the wrong top. Not so with DETECTIVE DEE. No missteps of emphasis or rhythm. And the designers clearly had spent a lot of time studying Tang dynasty art. The costumes, hair, palace furnishings, all looked like the galleries at the Met come to life. As a lover of Chinese art -- which youse know I am if youse are following the GHOST HERO Countdown on my website (bottom of the home page) -- this was like a special added bonus just for me.