I’m not a parent, but I know that you’re a bad one. You know why? Because you probably took your kids to see Cars 2 this weekend. I know what you’re thinking: “What’s wrong with Cars 2, it’s just a harmless little kids movie.” Well, it’s destroying America with it’s anti-oil message, indoctrinating our children to become Prius-buying, David Simon-worshipping tree huggers so the late-term-aborting hippie liberals at Pixar can do their part in carrying out Hollywood’s takeover of family values. You’re probably thinking, “But Landon, children typically don’t understand subtext. And when children grow up in a free democratic society such as ours they often question for themselves the values and ideas they were exposed to as children and eventually adopt a perspective that makes the most sense to them, thus making your use of ‘indoctrination’ hyperbolic and short-sighted. Anyway, even if they did understand what Pixar was doing, children don’t give a ratatouille’s ass about politics, the free market, offshore drilling, or our over-reliance on fossil fuels. They just want to watch a movie about talking cars. Also, being a child of the late 80s/early 90s, you grow up with a lot of environmentally-aware children’s entertainment like Jim Henson’s TV show Dinosaurs and movies like FernGully and The Brave Little Toaster, yet those didn’t inform your political perspective in either direction just as they didn’t make you think dinosaurs wore clothes and acted like the cast of All in the Family.” That would all be fine and dandy [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, movie slave monkey for UGO.com Matt Patches shows up to give us hell. After some witty banter, he and Cole discuss the finer points of racial tension, bring Jan de Bont to a gun fight, and take a look back on our entirely appropriate relationship with Robert Rodriguez. Plus, we find time to review Machete, The American, and Going the Distance.

It was getting a little worrisome around Reject HQ – what with Jan de Bont’s long hiatus from work. Fortunately, it appears as though the Speed and Speed 2: Cruise Control director is back in the business, totally still alive, and ready to helm the highly anticipated live-action Mulan adaptation starring Zhang Ziyi. That means, of course, that there will now be a bunch of explosions and a cow floating in a tornado in 2nd Century China. The Han Dynasty will never see it coming. De Bont last worked on Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life back in 2003, and 7 years is just too long to go without him. The film starts shooting this fall in China. [THR]

Foreign Objects travels the world of international cinema each week to look for films worth visiting. So renew your passport, get your shots, and brush up on the local age of legal consent, this week we’re heading to… China! Mulan isn’t necessarily a great movie, but it’s definitely a good one. Fans of recent period action epics like An Empress And the Warriors and Red Cliff should find much to enjoy here. There’s drama, romance, laughs, and some impressive battle scenes filled with swordplay and those “sky filled with arrows” shots apparently required by law to be in every period action film. For me though the movie is worth seeking out and importing for one main reason, and her name is Vicki Zhao Wei. She’s a fantastic actress as adept at comedy as she is action, and between that talent and her big, beautiful eyes she’s capable of conveying loss and sadness with real emotion and power. And she’s gorgeous too which is never a bad thing. Which is why it pains me to say that she’s also the movie’s biggest weakness…

Go buy Cult Spaghetti Westerns, Death Race 2000, and Mulan! Go rent The Good Guy, Green Zone, Hung, Kakera, Riverworld, and She’s Out Of My League! Stay the hell away from Twelve!

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we mourn the loss of Dennis Hopper and do a three-word review of Sex and the City 2.

If you only know the story of Mulan from Disney’s 1998 animated film then you are missing out… not because Disney’s movie is bad but because that chick isn’t real. You know who is real? Vicki Zhao Wei.

Mister Hand is excited to see what happens with a live-action adaptation of Disney’s Mulan — provided they ditch all those not-so-sweet tunes.