Yeah I know, everyone is posting screencaps from this. Here’s my five:

At long last, the trailer – which handles it’s number one task (tell audiences who these people are) in a refreshingly direct way: Introducing all of The Guardians in extended medium-shot in the context of getting booked into space jail. It’s also being very upfront about the real thing that differentiates this from the prior Marvel movies: Instead of an action film with comedy bits, this is a full-stop comedy with an action movie setting. That’s Karen Gillan as Nebula aka “the blue chick,” incidentally. This is gonna be nutty:

I don’t generally post “cheesecake” on this blog, but when I do it’s for something like this.

For those of you who say that the study of manned flight in Outer Space has nothing left to offer us, that our money would be better spent elsewhere, that nothing new and good can be attained by continuing to look to the stars, I give you: Kate Upton in zero-gravity.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

The “ROBOCOP” franchise is… not really “back” now in the way the people who paid for that shit remake were probably hoping it would be. Still, let’s look at some weird ripoffs of the original movie from the 80s and 90s:

Is it hypocritical to rail against the rampant bullshittery that is commercials for commercials and then excitedly post one when it’s for something you’re into? Probably, if you’re into trying to apply broad philosophical concepts like ideological consistency to real life. Fortunately, I’m a realist, which means I’m also fundamentally a pragmatist: Things are “good” when they and/or their results are good, things are “bad” when they and/or their results are bad – everything else is just so much academic masturbation.

Yeah, well… in my imagination, at least, Kitty Pryde was always a lesbian.

In all seriousness, though, this is fantastic. And before you jump in with “What’s the big deal???,” remember: Kansas – a part of a first-world country in 2014 – is trying to make it legal for businesses to refuse to serve gay people. You bet your ass this sort of thing still matters – it’s huge, in fact, because Ellen Page isn’t a former celebrity of some fringe TV persona; she’s a major Gen-Y star at probably the peak of her career. Her visibility as an openly gay woman, as cliche as this sounds, absolutely will give strength to people of her generation and younger to accept themselves, and the importance of that cannot be overestimated. No matter how many strides are made legally and otherwise, the first hurdle for LGBTQ youth is still finding a way to cast off the pressures of society and tradition and bullshit primitive superstitions about gender and sexuality and accept that they are who they are. And this helps. Every little bit of this helps. Today, this woman is a hero.

Sorry, folks – “not as bad as it could’ve been” is not the same thing as “not bad.”

The remake is terrible, you’ll hear more from me on that later. Until then, here’s this:

How did they get away with this?

Also, “THE MONUMENTS MEN,” which is okay.

When you think about it, it’s kind of odd that Paul Bettany seemed to recede as a leading man just when he was blowing up a decade ago. I think a lot of us just figured that we also wouldn’t find a lot of reasons to leave the house if we’d married Jennifer Connelly.

In any case, his most prominent mainstream role for about the last decade has been as the voice of Tony Stark’s omnipresent digital servant J.A.R.V.I.S. in the Marvel Studios movies; and as of an hour ago the long-term planning logic of hiring an upscale-accented Brit who’s also movie-star handsome for that role makes a lot more sense: He’ll stepping in front of the camera in “AVENGERS 2: AGE OF ULTRON” as robotic superhero The Vision.

Well, that’s interesting.

That Vision would turn up in the sequel was something of a foregone conclusion, being that his origins are tied to titular villain Ultron and his longest-running character-arc is a human/android romance with Scarlet Witch, previously announced and set to be played by Elizabeth Olsen (incidentally, I’d put serious money on her and Aaron Taylor Johnson’s Quicksilver showing up an establishing walk-on either in “CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER” or “GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY.”) For a long time, the popular fan theory was that he’d be a robotic revival for Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson (in the comics, Vision is created by Ultron using the brain-patterns of dead superhero Wonder Man and the chassis of the original android Human Torch) but “AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D” has taken that character in a markedly different direction.

So the smart money now says that Vision (whom I imagine will still start out as a henchman and either go good by the finale or be trending that way for “AVENGERS 3”) is some permutation of J.A.R.V.I.S, which is what a lot of people assumed would be Ultron’s origin – even after it was revealed months ago that James Spader, not Bettany, would be doing the voice. In the comics, Ultron is the gone-wrong creation of Hank “Ant-Man” Pym, but he won’t be showing up (so far) until “ANT-MAN” which comes out after this. So where does Ultron come from?

Given that the SDCC teaser for the film was an Iron Man helmet violent morphing into Ultron’s head, I think it’s still pretty safe to assume that Tony Stark will be the human creator Ultron turns on in the Cinematic Universe version of his origin. It just makes the most sense, and my expectation remains that “AVENGERS 2” will probably wrap-up with the team in a dark place (“EMPIRE STRIKES BACK,” “WRATH OF KHAN,” etc) and Iron Man in particular left in a defeated position from which to make some kind of triumphant swan-song in Part 3 (RDJ’s full-time Marvel contract runs out after that point.)

But if he (apparently) isn’t “Evil J.A.R.V.I.S,” what is he? An Iron Man armor with a mind of it’s own? Some new thing they’ll make up just for this film? Plausible. My own pet theory – which I’ve been joking about for awhile but now feel like they just might actually do – is that, since Ultron in the comics starts out as more-or-less a Roomba that builds itself a humanoid body, movie-Ultron could well be DUM-E (aka “Dummy”), Tony Stark’s loyal but mostly-useless pet robot-arm from the “IRON MAN” movies. How fun would that be, for The Avengers next big enemy to be a clumsy workshop-bot that finally gets sick of Tony making fun of it?