Tweet

… aside from the fact that I wouldn’t kick either of them out of bed?*

Ziyi Zhang (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Rush Hour 2) is a nimble little minx who makes me tingle. She’s also young, beautiful, dangerous, and proud to be Chinese. All adjectives aside, she’s an international movie star in search of a third shot at the big, Hollywood crossover career.

Hugh Grant (Notting Hill, About a Boy) is a bumbling little cad who makes me laugh. He’s also middle-aged, entertaining, spiky-haired, and less and less English every year. He’s an international movie star who long ago crossed over into Hollywood and has been hanging on (somewhat surprisingly) ever since.

And now Variety is reporting that they’re both this close (hold your index finger and thumb really close together for full effect) to starring together in Lost for Words, a new film from director Susanne Bier. If her name isn’t familiar to you it only means you haven’t seen any of her eleven Danish, Dutch, and/or Nordic movies she’s made over the last seventeen years. Or Halle Berry’s last film, Things We Lost in the Fire, which no one saw. Lost for Words is written by Jamie Curtis… no, not the one who just discovered a yogurt called Activia, the one who wrote Spice World. Grant would star as an English movie star headlining a film with a female Chinese director. He does the Ramen noodle dance with his perky translator only to discover that he’s actually been falling in love with the film’s director (Zhang) all along. Complications ensue when the only person who can communicate Grant’s love for Zhang is the spurned translator. How Grant wouldn’t realize immediately that Zhang is the Chinese dish he most wants to eat I’ll never understand… although he is notorious for having incredibly bad taste in oral sex partners.

* For the record, they’d be allowed to stay for completely different reasons.