Iron Man 3 posterThe newest trailer for Iron Man 3 hit the internet today to hype the UK’s April 25th debut in theaters, while we sad Yanks must wait for our May opening. However, if you’re anything like me, repeated viewings may help stem the long tide between now and then. Or not.

Tony has everything to lose in this new movie: his home, his woman, and, possibly, his life. This trailer gives us some solid glimpses into Ben Kingsley’s villain, the Mandarin, who will attack from the shadows and spur Tony to a very personal revenge:

Mandarin-Kingsley

Does that robe say “Deepened through blood”? Christ. Remember when Kingsley used to be Ghandi? No? Me either at this point.

Take a look at the trailer, after the jump.

jay_and_silent_bob_groovy_cartoonWe are a couple of days late on this one, but we wanted to deal with it for a couple of reasons. The first being that we at Crisis On Infinite Midlives are big fans of Kevin Smith’s Askewniverse movies – a sneak preview of Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in 2001 was Amanda’s and my first night out together – and we will always have a soft spot for those first few movies from Smith, when he was a crappy 20-something making movies out of love, rather than a 40-something pothead leveraging his name for quick profits on what amount to stand-up tours and podcasts, who makes movies when the urge strikes.

The second being that the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office has been invaded and laid low by the Bolivian Glandfucker Flu, meaning that watching and talking about cartoons is about the best that we can handle at this point.

So on that basis, we’re at least mildly excited about this trailer for the new Smith-produced (not written or directed, however; Steve Stark directed it and supposedly it was at least cowritten by Jason Mewes) movie, Jay and Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie, which you can check out after the jump.

iron_man_3_movie_posterGiven that Crisis On Infinite Midlives is based in Boston, it was difficult for us to escape the pervasive malaise that surrounds a Super Bowl that doesn’t include the New England Patriots. Combine the lack of the home team with the fact that co-Editor Amanda and I generally look forward to the Super Bowl only as a bellwether that we are only days away from pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training, and that football enthusiasts were the ones most likely to smack our copies of The Dark Knight Returns our of our hands in the halls of high school (all while guffawing in a manner that implied that high school somehow mattered, and that its social pyramid would go unchanged in the future, and that there wasn’t a chance in hell that someday you’d be gone to fat and earning your keep by rotating the tires on my expensive sports car, right, 1987 starting linebacker Jeff Chander, of 228 North Thompson Avenue?), and we just weren’t all that into the experience.

So here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, we spent the game as an excuse to drink beer and read – Amanda Jim Butcher’s new Dresden Files book Cold Days, and myself Paul Tobin’s prose superhero story (and, ironically, elegy for lost high school relationships) Prepare To Die! – with the game on in the background so we could occasionally look up and marvel that the truly shitty electrical engineering skills at play in a city best known for binge drinking, and at the commercials.

Specifically, we wanted to see the new commercial for and attendant new footage from Iron Man 3, as did every other red blooded comic book fan, both young and old enough to have grown up associating the sound of football pads crashing with the instinct to clench the ol’ buttocks against potential wedgies. And Marvel Studios delivered… albeit using the modern irritation of only showing a bit before teasing the masses to their Facebook page for more visual goodness in exchange for a cheap “like.” And if there’s one thing you don’t want to try with an older geek, it’s playing the sounds of football followed immediately by the command, “Now say that you like it!”

So to hell with the official channels; we have obtained the “extended look” trailer for Iron Man 3, and you can check it out too, right after the jump.

world_war_z_book_coverThe Super Bowl is tomorrow, which means that a large part of the population of the United States will be gathering in living rooms, taverns and bars to get shitfaced on generic American beer and watch television commercials. Rumor has it that there might also be a football contest.

Seriously: nobody gives a tin tinker’s damn about the football game tomorrow unless you live in San Francisco or Baltimore, and even then you probably don’t care because you’re too busy seeking the company of men, ducking bullets from the guns of drug dealers, or both of the above. Let’s face it: we’re in it for the commercials, and even most of those we don’t care about. After all, we will already be drinking Budweiser products, and one Internet domain name registrar is much the same as another despite he magnificence of Danika Patrick’s breasts.

Frankly, we’re in it for the teaser trailers for the summer blockbusters – to this day I remember when our contributor Trebuchet called me during the game to ask me if I’d seen the ad for a previously-unknown flick called The Matrix – and to be honest, who wants to sit there for three hours just to see thirty seconds of movie footage?

Well, not to worry, because we’ve got you covered. Specifically, the Super Bowl trailer for World War Z has leaked to the Internet, and we have it for you a day before the game. You can check it our after the jump.

superman_unboundWell, the good news is that professional people with some weird forms of PKE Meters have cleared the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office of any signs of water damage and / or Black Mold. The bad news is that the entire ordeal took a lot more time than I anticipated, and beyond that, now my dreams of chucking the workaday world of comics blogging in favor of a home-grown psilocybin farming business (but I still own the name Boston Baseboard Shrooms! And all it’s subsidiary rights!) have officially gone tits up.

And the worse news is that, even as the Home Office has been cleared for human habitation… yeah, heavy windstorms in Boston have knocked out our Internet. Meaning that we can only do a quick update today, using my aged cell phone as a half-assed Wi-Fi hotspot, in clear violation of my terms of service, and way outside the scope of what the good folks at Westinghouse Electrical Notions and Radio Communication Geegaws intended.

But we do have a bit of news: Warner Bros. has released a teaser trailer for their latest upcoming animated, direct-to-video feature. It’s gonna be Superman: Unbound, and based on a Geoff Johns written and Gary Franks drawn series in Action Comics back in 2008. Now, I’m not the biggest Superman fan in the world, but I have never seen a bad DC animated feature, and this one looks to be just as solid.

The feature’s gonna star the voice talents of Matt Bomer (from White Collar) as Superman and Molly Quinn as Supergirl, And you can check out the trailer after the jump… in theory, assuming my shaky, improvised Internet access holds (and if it doesn’t we’ll fix it when we have more signal).

star_trek_into_darkness_poster_1It has been a busy week here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office; our neighbors seem to have decided to leave Boston for the winter to avoid the stretch of zero-degree weather we had the last week. They also apparently decided to save themselves a big gas bill by leaving their heat off, which is something that all plumbing enjoys during zero degree weather. So we have been plagued with inspections for water damage and potential burgeoning Black Mold by firefighters and building managers, all who whom espoused concern about our health while nervously eyeing the office stashes of whiskey and cigarettes.

We have a tentative All Clear call, so hopefully our posting schedule will return more to normal soon. But we only have time this morning to provide you with the latest hype video for J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek Into Darkness… which is basically a replay of the original trailer with a bunch of people involved in the movie waxing orgasmically over the experience of working on the film. Which you can check out after the jump.

j_j_abrams_headshotDisney and Lucasfilm clearly have a deeply-rooted hatred of honest, hardworking writers about comics and genre entertainment. There is no other reason for them, after a full day of unanswered and anonymously-sourced rumors that J. J. Abrams has been hired to direct Star Wars: Episode VII, to finally issue a press release on the subject. On Friday night. Well after what is widely accepted and known as Beer O’Clock amongst decent comics bloggers. So by the time I noticed it, I thought that the fine folks at the Disney Corporation had declared war upon us. And that they were sending J. J. Abrams to direct the attack, with Lawrence Kasdan and Simon Kinberg in consulting positions. And that, for some reason, they had sent two press releases side by side, and that they were coated with something that was making the room spin. Sure, more bourbon helped, but after that, I became convinced that Lucasfilm was trying to sell me some herbal Viagra. Things get a little hazy after that.

But it is morning now. The birds are singing, the sun is bright, and I have finished throwing up. And it turns out that, yeah: Disney and Lucasfilm has confirmed that J. J. Abrams has signed on to direct the new Star Wars movie after all. We’ve got the press release after the jump… and here’s hoping that it treats you better than it did me last night.

star_wars_logoAs of this writing, this is a one-source story based on comments from “an individual with knowledge,” with no confirmation from anyone actually named in the story… but this is, after all, the Internet, where things like confirmation and reputable, on-the-record sources happen to other media. Dying media. Media with the budget to make phone calls to people who know things. And besides, if I waited for “confirmation” for everything I saw on the Internet, I’d still be waiting for a call back vis-a-vis whether that girl in the schoolgirl suit was, in fact, a schoolgirl, and I’d never ejaculate again.

What was I talking about again?

Oh yeah: The Wrap is reporting that J. J. Abrams has signed to direct Star Wars: Episode VII.

DDThe 2013 Sundance Film Festival began last Thursday out in Park City, Utah. It has been notable so far for the critical buzz that has been generated around director John Krokidas’s Kill Your Darlings, in which Harry Potter‘s Daniel Radcliffe takes on the role of a young, love struck Allen Ginsberg, who is in love with classmate Lucien Carr, played by Dane DeHaan. We also got potential spoiler news on the next Amazing Spider-Man movie when Krokidas introduced DeHaan from his cast to the screening audience as “the Green Goblin” and DeHaan, who is definitely set to play Harry Osborn, didn’t deny it.

Also, for those of us who couldn’t get out to Utah for the festival, the folks at Sundance have posted their short film program to a YouTube channel. The films range from a PSA spoof on the dangers of catnip for your cat to end of the world/apocalypse/zombie scenarios to a Greek tragedy enacted by Belgian roosters. Yes. I typed that correctly. You have to watch it to believe it.

Check out some of the featured short films after the jump.

y_the_last_man_volume_1_coverBrian K. Vaughn’s and Pia Guerra’s Vertigo comic Y: The Last Man has been in development by New Line Studios for more than five years, not that the phrase “in development” really has any meaning. After all, Preacher has been popping on and off Hollywood’s radar for years, in development as both a movie and a TV show, with heavy hitters like Skyfall director Sam Mendes and John Cusack rumored to be attached at one point or another (until Mendes grabbed James Bond and Cusack apparently started believing that “Preacher” was some form of synthetic mescaline), and somewhere in a trunk I have a bad xerox of a draft of Blue Beetle writer John Rogers’s Mage: The Hero Discovered screenplay that’s dated something like 2001, and at this point, I think we’re more likely to see Mage: The Hero Denied before that flick gets made.

So what with the years of dithering –  and my personal belief that the minute someone actually shouts “Action” on a Y: The Last Man flick, science fiction writer Frank Herbert’s estate will swoop down with a crippling lawsuit, as we have established that those guys will do any awful Goddamned thing for money – it didn’t seem like a Y movie would ever get made.

And it still might not. But it’s at least a step closer. Because Deadline is reporting that Dan Trachtenberg is now attached to direct the thing.

And if you’re a Y: The Last Man fan like me, who owns every issue of the series and is praying this movie gets made and is a hit so he can sell those issues and maybe afford health insurance someday, you probably heard this news, sat up straight, and said: “Who?”