The women have been really hard to come by -- at least when The Women in question is a remake of the 1939 classic. (What is it with the year 1939 lately?) MGM was first focused on the project, but no real headway was made and the title was sold to Ted Turner as part of MGM's library. He, in turn, bought New Line and made the film a starring vehicle for Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan, with James L. Brooks signed on to direct (1994). It was at this point that Diane English was brought on to the production, a writer known for her work on Murphy Brown. It took a handful of years and then she was named director of the project in 2001. It took another 5 years to get further, when Matt Bradshaw posted about the cast of the film, which consisted of Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow, Anne Hathaway and Candice Bergen. It was supposed to start shooting in March, but nothing happened when Spring rolled around.

Now Variety has the scoop on The Women, which almost has a finalized cast, and has gotten an actual start date -- August 6 -- over ten years after the adaptation was put in the works. Some of the cast has stayed the same, and some have changed. Along with Ryan and Bergen, actresses in final talks are Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith and Debra Messing. That's really one hell of a cast considering that the film has got a budget under $20 million. One of the backers is Dove, you know, the soap? When the film begins to be marketed, I imagine there will be lots and lots of soap-centric commercials with these leading ladies. As for how the title is translated over 60 years later, word has it that English's "script maintains the arch spirit of the original, and the all-female cast, but the gals aren't as relentlessly catty this time around." It is, however, still about the group of female friends and how one's husband is cheating on her.

In a rare bit of weekend casting news, Production Weekly reported last night that Antonio Banderas and Annette Bening (which, for some reasons, strikes me as a vary odd pair) will play the lead roles in Homeland Security -- not to be confused, mind you, with Homeland Insecurity, a Robert J. Siegel-penned comedy spec recently picked up by Miramax. The film is being called "a mystery in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief," a description that, if it's actually accurate, could be promising indeed. There's nothing wrote with pretty people flirting over a robbery or two, right? The problem, of course, is that when today's Hollywood tries to follow that path, the results tend be things like The Real McCoy and Entrapment, so it's anyone's guess how this one will turn out.

The film was written and will be directed by George Gallo, a man who, though he is to blame for the "story" behind Bad Boys and the screenplay for Double Take, also wrote Midnight Run, which is a very good thing indeed. Production is set to begin in Louisiana this fall.

The latest in casting news from Cannes:

• Laura Dern has joined the cast of Tenderness, the Russell Crowe-starring indie flick we told you about last month. The movie takes on the unsettling subject of a teenage serial killer and his romantic entanglement with a damaged runaway girl. Crowe plays a cop who tries to figure the kid out; it's not clear what role Dern will play. The movie begins shooting this week in New York.

• Sean Mathias is directing Colossus, based on Ann Harries' Manly Pursuits, a novel about the Boer War. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film's scored a pretty impressive cast, considering that its budget is a relatively small $15 million: Colin Firth, Rachel Weisz, Ian McKellen and Susan Sarandon are all on-board. Though it's not yet been announced which roles the stars will play, the movie "tells of ailing arch-colonist Cecil Rhodes' [probably McKellen] belief that he can only recover his health if he can hear the sound of English song birds outside his window in Cape Town." Get this: Someone is sent from England with 500 freaking songbirds. When he gets there, he falls in love and decides he needs to stop the Boer War from happening. Ah, if only all men in love would immediately resolve to end wars -- what a lovely world this would be.
  

• Oscar Wilde is coming back to the big screen, this time in the hands of Janusz Kaminski, who is directing an adaptation of A Woman of No Importance. Set to begin filming this fall, the movie is about "an ambitious young man, Gerald Arbuthnot, who introduces his prospective employer, Lord Illingworth, to his mother." Because this is Wilde, it turns out the man has a bit of a history with the mother, and in fact is Gerald's dad. Oops. Set to star in the film are Annette Bening, the ubiquitous Lindsay Lohan and the under-appreciated Sean Bean. Thank the lord someone is letting Bean do something funny -- he's been sporting a macho glower for, like, two decades.