Go to the video store and get the original. I do not understand why Hollywood has that need to take a perfect foreign movie and remake it. "Mostly Martha" or "Bella Martha" has a much better cast. Beginning with the heroine Martina Gedeck, who convinced me much more in the role of the work-obsessed perfectionist than the more famous Catherine Zeta Jones, to the Italian cook and the niece suddenly deprived of her mother and forced to live with an aunt, not fit for child-rearing. In many ways, the American version of the movie is a copy of the German original. They just exchanged the actors. However, they also changed the story because it would have been difficult and not very believable to materialize a father for the little girl in an American context. I was thinking about that. Maybe the father could have been Puerto Rican, or Cuban, or Mexican. Well, there are so many "guest workers" in the U.S. Take your pick. But I doubt that any of them would have shown up to shoulder the responsibility as the Italian father did in the original. Therefore, the American movie leaves that part out but keeps the Italian cook. And by doing this the whole story changes. In the original "Martha" is so removed from reality that she thinks it is okay to send her niece off with a complete stranger in a foreign country. The American "Martha" is softer and therefore the movie is sweeter and does not have that edge the German movie has. In the original the "Italian" cook is not so good looking but much more charming , the little girl is more of a brat but much more believable and "Martha" is more representative of a career woman in today's world than the watered down version we are presented in the American version. And the whole opera music in the American version was very annoying. I loved the Italian songs in the original and bought the CD. Hollywood recognized that "Mostly Martha" was a great movie. Maybe the distribution companies should have put it in more theaters or it should have been shown in English without subtitles. In any case, the original is so much better. By the way this reminds me of another remake. "Shall we dance" is one of my favorites in the original Japanese version and totally forgettable in the American version.
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