Kicking It Old School

 

Via Ian McDowell, this juicy trailer from Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. Directed by my onetime creative associate Tsui Hark, with fight chorography by Sammo Hung, and starring Andy Lau, Carina Lau, and Tony Leung (Ka-fai).  The movie was nominated for thirteen Hong Kong Film Awards and won six.

I’m always happy to see Judge Dee in any of his incarnations.  My first introduction to the character came from the series of mystery novels by Robert van Gulik, a Dutch diplomat whose assignments kept him in the Far East for most of his life.   Van Gulik began by translating a largely-forgotten Ming dynasty mystery novel into English, and then followed The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee by writing a large number of original mysteries featuring the character.

Not that the character is fictional.  Judge Dee, more properly Di Renjie, was a genuine Tang Dynasty official celebrated for upright conduct and for solving  complicated mysteries, and whose real life seems to have been eventful enough for half a dozen novels.  In any case, he was the hero of a lot of Ming Dynasty popular fiction.

Chinese mystery novels tend to feature magic and the occult— the deceased’s ghost is often a character— but van Gulik eschewed this tradition in his own work, following Western models.  Judging by this trailer, the magic is back, along with a whole lot of wire fu.

I’ll be counting the days.