• Variety cultural conversations about a TV show lift its Emmy prospects
• The Guardian on Leonard Bernstein's 10 year affair with a Japanese fan
• /Film Bond 25 has a title No Time to Die
• Daily Xtra Joey Moser remembers seeing movies with his father on the weekend - lovely
After the jump Love Simon, Spider-Man divorce, cool film festivals, and Marvel Comics avoiding anti-fascist "politics" in a genre built on just that...
• Gizmodo makes a case why we should be very worried about Disney sucking up other companies in terms of diversity
• Pajiba Marvel and Sony are parting ways over Spider-Man. No more Avengers for Spidey :(
• EW Michael Cimino (not the director but a young actor) cast as the lead in the TV adaptation of Love Simon
• Movie Maker the 25 coolest film festivals in the world
• Coming Soon recommends movies to watch if you loved HBO's Euphoria
Today's Must Read
The Guardian publishes an essay by Art Spiegelman on the history of comics and the relevance of the stories today. It was intended as a forward to a Marvel book but the publisher wanted the following sentence removed to avoid "politics" (sigh)... reminding us again that real life moral superheroes like Captain America are hard to find, even within companies devoted to selling their myth.
Auschwitz and Hiroshima make more sense as dark comic book cataclysms than as events in our real world. In today’s all too real world, Captain America’s most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America. International fascism again looms large (how quickly we humans forget – study these golden age comics hard, boys and girls!) and the dislocations that have followed the global economic meltdown of 2008 helped bring us to a point where the planet itself seems likely to melt down. Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we’re all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams.