Odds: Thursday - "Crash" goes small screen, and the death of sexy cinema.

By Alison Willmore on 04/06/2006

WENN reports that "Crash" is being adapted into the TV series we all knew it could be:

The film's producer Cathy Schulman says, "I hope it will air in the next year.

"The actors from the film will show up. Don Cheadle is a producer and will also be on at least a few episodes.

"We'll see about everyone else."

We're really looking forward to the episode where Sandra Bullock becomes addicted to caffeine pills and has a breakdown. And also the episode where Jennifer Esposito turns out not to have been dead, but actually in a coma, and she returns just in time (if a little crazy) to stop Ludacris' marriage to Thandie Newton. And also the episode where Matt Dillon waterski-jumps over a shark, but only after first molesting the shark and then saving it from a car wreck.

Via Coming Soon, "Bend It Like Beckham"'s Gurinder Chadha is in talks to direct the feature adaptation of "Dallas," now that Robert Luketic has dropped out.

In the Guardian, Chris McGreal talks to the new Palestinian culture minister, Attallah Abu al-Sibbah:

The Gaza strip's three big cinemas closed at the beginning of the first intifada in 1987, and never reopened. Mr Sibbah thinks they should start showing films again but he is concerned about what the viewers will see.

"I would open cinemas. It could be an education and help people live better. Hollywood is not all bad. 'Titanic' was a good film, a human film," he said, apparently having cast from his mind the scenes of Kate Winslet disrobed.

But he is less sure about the Oscar-nominated Palestinian film, "Paradise Now," which shows the preparation of suicide bombers for an attack on Israelis.

The film's questioning of suicide attacks does not sit well with a party that glorifies such deaths.

"There are problems, there are some scenes, some observations, some pictures. We can negotiate. I will see it first. If I need to cut it I will cut. This is normal. Every country has censors. But we have no problem showing it," he said.

Also in the Guardian, Sophie Heawood talks to psychoanalyst Caroline Kipling about "Basic Instinct 2," while in Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman weighs in on what the film's box office (and critical, but really, was that a surprise?) failure means for sex in cinema:

Even art cinema, that last holdout, has mostly given up the ghost. In the '60s and '70s, the films of Europe blazed a powerful sexual trail. Today, the austere parables of artists like Abbas Kiarostami or the Dardenne brothers are praised for their ''purity,'' almost as if these lofty visions would be compromised by a little dirty pleasure. It's almost hard to remember the way that filmmakers like Federico Fellini, with his hedonistic reveries in "La Dolce Vita" or "Satyricon," or Ingmar Bergman, with his outrageously gorgeous and sensual actresses (Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann), or Bernardo Bertolucci, with the earthquake that was "Last Tango in Paris," reveled in the ferment of the erotic. What seemed, back then, like a revolution looks more and more like an endgame: the last tango for sex in cinema.

So what about Carlos Reygadas and Catherine Breillat, who go places Fellini never did (or, likely, felt the need to) while also seeming hellbent on dissuading audience members from ever wanting to have sex again? That's not a rhetorical question, we're curious as to where others see the new Distasteful Sex Cinema fitting in to all of this.

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Johnny Ray Huston offers up former mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez interviewing filmmaker Stanley Nelson about his new doc "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple."

And at Slate, staffers Michael Agger, Dahlia Lithwick, Meghan O'Rourke, and June Thomas discuss the "United 93" trailer, whether it's inappropriate, and whether it's too soon.

+ Crash coming to the small screen (WENN)
+ Gurinder Chadha to Direct Dallas (ComingSoon.net)
+ Bellydancing out, cinema in, says Hamas (Guardian)
+ Another view (Guardian)
+ The Naked Truth (Entertainment Weekly)
+ 28 years later (San Francisco Bay Guardian)
+ United 93 (Slate)