Locarno Diary #1: The festival begins with "Beckett"

by Elisa Giudici

A couple of weeks after having saying goodbye to Cannes and to the superb blue sea of the French Riviera, I am back at it by the majestic, cloudy mountains of Switzerland for the Locarno Film Festival: the long summer of European festival continues!

Up top you see the Piazza Grande (the biggest outdoor screen in Europe!) where we'll discover smaller movies and younger directors than the ones seen (and reviewed) at the Croisette. Unfortunately today the weather is really rainy. I am writing these lines with my raincoat on, wishing I followed that note I write to my future self every year at Locarno to stuff appropriate clothes in my car for mountain weather. The scenery is really majestic though, with clouds moving fast over the mountain tops and the city, like you're inside Olivier Assayas' Sils Maria.

Enough with scenery, let's talk about the opening night film... 

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Horror Costuming: Suspiria

A special miniseries for Halloween by Cláudio Alves

Costume sketches by Giulia Piersanti

As cinephiles, we're often too quick to condemn the idea of the remake. But remakes can often be illuminating. A good remake is a conversation made of echoes refracted through cinema and cultural history and time, as valuable, in its own way, as the original picture.

Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria is perhaps the supreme example of this. Instead of replicating Dario Argento's 1977 post-Giallo masterpiece, Guadagnino and his team have created an entirely new work that further explores themes only glanced at in the first movie. Even its look is excitingly different, autumnal and chilly where the previous film was carnivalesque and hot-blooded. One could write about the perfection of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's cinematography or Inbal Weinberg's scenography, but, today, you're invited to reflect on the work of costume designer Giulia Piersanti…

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Sixteen Linkles

• Vulture why Charlize Theron is so pleasurable to watch in action films
• My New Plaid Pants Luca Guadagnino signing on to deliver a feature adaptation of Scotty Bower's "Full Service" which has already inspired a feature doc and that gas station as whorehouse in Ryan Murphy's Hollywood
• Vanity Fair What Olivia de Havilland remembered about the 1939 Oscars 

After the jump, Ramy's nominations, Michael Fassbender's return, Hugh Jackman's butt, Scarface memories, X-Men's 20th, and more...

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Night of the Living Link

• Theater Mania the Tony Awards to be replaced by... a Grease sing-a-long? Broadway fans are not happy about it. There are so many ways CBS could have filled the air time that were still about current or classic theater
• The Guardian In career trajectories we totally dont understand Luca Guadagnino who started off so masterfully with fresh filmmaking in I Am Love and Call Me By Your Name is signed on for his THIRD remake, this time its Scarface (1983) which was itself a remake of course
• New York Times a must-read oral history of the making of Mad Max: Fury Road

What We Do in the Shadows, new Criterion BluRays, a remake of "10", a new project for Michael B Jordan, more celebrity deaths (sniffle) and other topics after the jump...

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Lady of the Flies

by Jason Adams

Let's take a break from Movie News to take a look at an exciting television project that's just been announced that's gathering together a pair of our favorite people -- Destroyer director Karyn Kusama has worked on TV before, most notably directing some of the finest episodes of the great Halt and Catch Fire, but she's about to Executive Produce and direct the pilot episode of a show for Showtime called Yellowjackets, which sounds like a Lord of the Flies and Alive riff. And taking it from merely exciting to "Put It In My Face Right Now!" is today's fresh word that Friend-of-TFE and Massively Under-appreciated Actress Melanie Lynskey is taking the lead. Says Variety:

"The project tells the story of a team of talented high school girls soccer players who survive a plane crash deep in the Ontario wilderness. The series chronicles their descent from a complicated but thriving team to warring, cannibalistic clans, while also tracking the lives they’ve attempted to piece back together nearly 25 years later.

Lynskey will play Shauna Sheridan, one a handful of survivors of the plane crash. 25 years later, Shauna is on a mission to reclaim her agency — her life — while doing everything in her power to keep her darkest secrets safe."

Funny enough back in July it was announced that Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino was in talks to actually adapt Lord of the Flies itself for a new film -- for a time there was a rumor he was switching genders from William Golding's book, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Still it seems pointed that stories about groups of reasonable people turning savage are the next big thing -- sounds like Life In 2019 to me!