Foreign Objects travels the world of international cinema each week looking for films worth visiting. So renew your passport, get your shots, and brush up on the local age of legal consent… this week we’ve got a dinner date with Shakespeare. By way of China. Ang Lee’s phenomenal Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon kicked off a decade of similarly beautiful wuxia epics with films like House Of Flying Daggers, Hero, The Promise, and Curse Of the Golden Flower. Lee’s film remains the best of the bunch by far, but one that comes close to equaling it in visual and aural beauty is The Banquet. It lacks the overwhelming emotion and heartbreaking romance of Lee’s Academy Award winning film, but it does have glorious imagery and cinematography, the always exquisite Zhang Ziyi, and a fine literary pedigree in a story based loosely on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Oh, it also has a lame Americanized title courtesy of the Weinsteins…

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]

If you read a lot of movie blogs, chances are that you’ve seen plenty of suggestions about this week’s top rumor, the question of who should play The Black Cat in Spider-Man 4. You can throw all of those suggestions out the window, because we’ve got our own list of ladies who should be wearing tight outfits and sneaking into NYC banks.

Reports are coming in 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.

It’s not unheard of for world news and politics to cross over into the entertainment industry. But one thing is for certain… when it happens, you can find some celebrity in the middle of the whole thing making an absolute ass out of himself or herself.