A little more than three years ago Variety‘s Michael Fleming reported that former bigtime auteur Lawrence Kasdan (Grand Canyon, The Big Chill, et. al.) was starting work (along with screenwriter Terri Minsky) on a U.S. remake of Sandra Nettlebeck‘s Mostly Martha for Castle Rock. There was moderate excitement about this since pretty much everyone with any taste was fairly taken with the ’01 German-made original. In June 2002, back in my Reel.com period, I ran a rave about Martha, calling it “a culinary Kramer vs. Kramer” about a female Hamburg chef with selfish tendencies (movingly played by Martina Gedeck) having to take care of her recently deceased sister’s young daughter — I also called it “the most succulent, sensually appetizing, food-trip movie since Big Night or even Babette’s Feast .” But Kasdan and Minsky, who wanted to set their film is some foodie city like New Orleans or San Francisco, ran into difficulty (I don’t know what kind) and their movie never happened. In May ’04, however, a moderately painful, obviously Martha-inspired confection called Raising Helen, directed by Garry Marshall and starring Kate Hudson and John Corbett, was released by Disney and wound up earning just under $40 million domestically. It had the same set-up (sister dies in car crash, selfish single professional woman suddenly has to take care of her kids, etc.) although Hudson’s Helen wasn’t a chef — she worked at a modelling agency. I thought that was the end of that saga, but no….there’s a second Mostly Martha knockoff currently rolling in Manhattan’s West Village, and this one is a little closer to the bone since it’s a resuscitation of the Castle Rock-Kasdan project. It’s being directed by Shine‘s Scott Hicks and stars the uber-capitalist, T-Mobile-hawking Catherine Zeta-Jones as the selfishly-inclined lead character (who this time is back to being a chef). The script is by Carol Fuchs, the boyfriend is being played by Aaron Eckhardt and the little orphaned girl is being played by Little Miss Sunshine‘s Abigail Breslin. CZJ’s character is called Martha but the IMDB is calling the movie an “Untitled Scott Hicks Film.” The IMDB chat boards about this film are hilarious — these are hardcore types, of course, but they all loved the original and despise the idea of a remake, they loathe CZJ and they all hope that it flops. I personally think it’s fine — Hicks is a pretty good director (putting aside the issue of Snow Falling on Cedars) and although the sweet European tone of Gettlebeck’s original Martha will almost certainly be lost, this Warner Bros. release may turn out okay. It’s just too bad that Kasdan’s version never happened (the IMDB says his next project is a Tom Hanks father-son relationship piece called The Risk Pool). And I think it’s unfortunate that the Gary Marshall-Kate Hudson version was made in the first place since it probably half-poisoned the well in terms of future audience interest. A fairly sizable crowd saw it, after all, and it’s probably safe to assume some of them will go, “Hey, isn’t this the same old thing?” when they start hearing about the Hicks version.

I mentioned something a while back about David Morrisey, Sharon Stone‘s costar in Basic Instinct 2 (Columbia, 3.31), not being “her sexual equal…his eyes are too small and his pale freckly face is a bit soft and puffy.” One presumes Morrisey was hired for the part because of this…because he would make Stone look good. Can anyone imagine Stone and director Michael Caton-Jones deciding to cast an exceptionally handsome and photogenic younger costar? This movie was Stone’s show…she‘s the one who had to look great, not the guy.

“As long as the leadership at the other agencies remains static, many Hollywood players are putting their money on Endeavor as the one that could mount a challenge to the CAA monolith. The solution for Endeavor would be to follow the CAA model of focusing on teamwork and efficiency — and bring in more top agents like ex-CAA agent [Patrick] Whitesell. ‘If they pick off a partner or two from the other agencies,’ one producer says, ‘the balance could shift pretty quickly. Pull over an Ed Limato and shake the power balance. CAA can’t handle everybody. One defection, and the ball will start rolling in Endeavor’s direction.” — from Anne Thompson‘s 4.24 “Risky Business“/ Hollywood Reporter column

If you’re mainly a WIRED reader (i.e., not into reading the feature stories in this column), I’ll reiterate the key point of today’s Snakes on a Plane story, which is that New Line Cinema’s 8.18 release date — five months from now — is a mistake at this stage, given all the excitement being generated right now. No movie company can orchestrate what’s happening with Snakes, and it’s folly to think that the present energy levels will keep up for another 19 or 20 weeks. If New Line’s distribution chief Russell Schwartz is smart, he’ll push Snakes into theatres sometime in late May or at least sometime in June — strike when the iron is hot! My New Line source says “there’s a heavy debate about this going on right now. Some want to stay with August because that gives you a couple of weeks free and clear…the competition isn’t too bad then. But others want to go sooner, for obvious reasons.”

Holy coyote! Holy fruit salad!…now the N.Y. Daily News has sided with the N.Y. Times in this completely groundless beep-beep vs. meep-meep debate, which, of course, Hollywood Elsewhere is totally on the audibly-correct side of. I’ll say once again to these old-media newspaper editors who keep using “beep beep”… listen to one of the damn Roadrunner cartoons already. I know this will require extra effort…I know it’ll take time out of your lunch hour, but just sit down, put on the headphones and actually listen to one of the damn things and ask yourself, “Is the Roadrunner really going ‘beep beep’?” If you do this and your answer is “yes, absolutely!” then you either need a hearing aid or therapy.

Steve Buscemi keeps getting bumped off in his movies, and when he directs movies (like the upcoming Lonesome Jim) he always seems to make them about loser gloom-heads…but the thing moviegoers love about Buscemi…his ace-in-the-hole material…is when he plays extra-smart guys saying really sassy lines. Reservoir Dogs‘ Mr. Pink explaining why he doesn’t tip, that psycho killer in Con Air explaining the meaning of irony, his high-IQ mobster Tony Blundetto imploring Tony Soprano, “Put me in, coach!” I once suggested to him during an interview that he make and act in a short film about that bar fight he got into two or three years ago standing up for Vince Vaughan, and Buscemi gave me a look that said, “What the fuck are you talking about?” And I’m saying to him right now, “What are you doing directing movies about low-life downer types all the time? Fuck that…play a really sharp wise guy, or direct a movie about one.”

Basic Instinct 2 (Columbia, 3.31) “will almost certainly be hailed as unforgettable — though not, perhaps, for the reasons that Stone and the filmmakers intended. The movie, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, finds Sharon Stone‘s oversexed ice-queen author, Catherine Tramell, squaring off against a criminal psychologist (British actor David Morrissey) as she goes on trial for the murder of a soccer player. If you expect an erotic thriller, you may be sorely disappointed. But if you expect soft-core camp, you will be rewarded with a showstopper nearly in the league of the weirdly mesmerizing Showgirls. Stone prowls, purrs and struts through every scene, delivering a performance so over-the-top that she elevates a bad movie into a must-see diva extravaganza.” — Newsweek‘s Sean Smith in the current issue.

“I’ve had it with these snakes!” — one of Samuel L. Jackson‘s money lines in New Line’s Snakes on a Plane (8.18). (This is an unfinished trailer — some of the CG snakes look like something out of a cartoon.)

Will Smith may have another half-decent film opening later this year, and perhaps more: Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia, 12.15), directed by Gabriele Muccino and written by Steve Conrad. It’s about a salesmen having a tough time (Smith) as he takes custody of his son (played by Smith’s son, Jaden). In any event, Mike Sampson at JoBlo has seen an early cut and reviewed it. An excerpt: “Will this be an Oscar contender or a blockbuster? I’d say Smith has a good chance of being nominated, though nothing else really stuck out to me as being great. A blockbuster? Smith might be able to bring in the crowds, but as it’s Smith as you’ve never seen him before (the man pretty much made me cry), tough to say if it’ll break the bank. The relationship between father and son might be the best ever filmed, and as it’s based on a true story, it really is inspiring. You’ve heard of rags-to-riches stories before, but most times they gloss over the rags part. Not here. This is a movie about struggles, about fatherhood, about being a provider, about being a man and above all else, about the pursuit of happiness.”

Ridley Scott‘s Kingdom of Heaven “Director’s Cut” (191 minutes), which I saw and reviewed early last January, is coming out on DVD on 5.23. And Mr. Beaks’ Collider site is having a free screening of it 4.4 on Hollywood’s Arclight.

We’re all tired of hearing that Sofia Coppola‘s Marie-Antoinette (Columbia, 10.13), which will play at the Cannes Film Festival in mid May, is going to be a stylized take on the life of the young Austrian-born woman (Kirsten Dunst) who became the Paris Hilton of her day when she married King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), and not a “historically accurate” capturing of any kind except for the 18th Century sets, clothes and hairstyles. What’s instructive, perhaps, is that before deciding to use Lady Antonia Fraser‘s biography of the ill-fated empty vessel and party girl –“Marie Antoinette: The Journey,” which adopts a view that Antoinette was misunderstood and suffered some tough breaks and met her demise with a touch of class — that Coppola first considered using Stefan Zweig‘s “Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman,” but then decided it was “too severe” for her. Judgment-wise, did she mean? Zweig’s book declared that Antoinette was “flawed, egotistic, intellectually limited and indiscreet…her greatest passions were for clothes, vast flowery gardens, [fancy] jewelry and good-looking Swedish men; she was a compulsive spendthrift; her political self-awareness was zero and her policy meddling was uniformly disastrous.” Whereas Coppola, it seems clear, is looking to cut the girl a break. “I’ve always loved the story of Marie-Antoinette and the decadence of Versailles on the brink of revolution, and the fact she was just a teenager when circumstances forced her to play a significant role in history,” she said last year. “Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were lost children in a crazy world…Marie-Antoinette was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” Like I said weeks ago, I’ll be willing to roll with this sympathetic confection (which is apparently scored with pop music tunes in the vein of A Knight’s Tale) if Coppola gives us a nice, blood-spattered head-dropping-into-the-basket shot when it comes to the guillotine sequence…like Andrezj Wajda did with the executions in Danton.

Roadside Attractions will distribute the Berlin Film Festival hit The Road to Guantanamo in the U.S. of A. sometime early this summer. Which means, of course, that only people in the big cities will see it in theatres and everyone else will rent the DVD through Netflix. Co-directed by the always-slightly-irritating Michael Winterbottom, it’s a docudrama about three British Muslims who were nabbed by U.S. authorities during a visit to Pakistan and were held as suspected terrorists at the U.S. base in Guantanamo for two years because…well, see the film. The victims weren’t exactly British gent types (with their Arab-y features and black squiggly beards, Paul Greengrass could have cast them as the terrorists in Flight 93) and people make mistakes, but c’mon…two years? Road was co-directed by Mat Whitcross. Pic won the Silver Bear award at last February’s Berlin festival.