(Courtesy spoiler alert: the following segment takes place roughly 100 minutes into Iron Man 3, give or take a repartee exchange. Proceed at your own risk.)
[Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., is somewhere far away from espionage — somewhere therapeutic, idyllic, free from strife and warfare and stimulation. Let’s say a random hotel bar in Charleston, West Virginia. Fury is required by company guidelines to take a vacation at least once every ten years. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents may consider most HR guidelines a joke, but HR wins one out of every 1,000 battles. Mandatory decennial vacations was one of them. Saving the world may be a 24/7/365/eternal vocation, but Fury for once has drink in hand and nothing on his mind but sweet, rare solitude.
His eye is fixed on his Product Placement Phone lying on the tabletop. Predator is streaming via Product Placement MovieStreamCloud App thing.]
FURY: Man, I haven’t watched this in ages. The scrawny, four-eyed guy is even stupider than I remember.
[The worst scene in the movie is interrupted by the S.H.I.E.L.D. Priority Alpha Mega Alpha One Supreme Alert shrieking-HD-klaxon app. Fury sighs and taps the SPAMOSA icon. Agent Dodge, a relative nobody of an underling, is on the other line.]
NICK FURY: You just lost two pay grades.
I would be remiss in my comics fandom if I didn’t take a moment to plug the heck out of the twelfth annual 
As of tonight, now we know for certain why NBC tastefully postponed the new Revolution episode “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” from last week. At first I wondered if the reason would be more scenes of Nora carrying out heroic bombing on behalf of the Rebel Alliance, but no. Even more unnerving, given the events of last week in real life: this week, Sebastian “Bass” Monroe, President of the Monroe Republic, mad with electrical power and incensed paranoia, sends a few henchmen to Atlanta, the capital of the neighboring Georgia Federation, to threaten it with an old-fashioned suitcase nuke. Presumably Monroe and his loyal scientists have been sitting on this portable, stylish WMD through all fifteen years of the blackout, waiting for the opportunity to fire it up and stop postponing WWIII. Luckily for them, most fissile materials have a half-life with a distant expiration date.
As with most big-budget sci-fi films nowadays, many viewers will spend half the running time of the new Tom Cruise vehicle Oblivion mentally tallying how many refurbished components they recognize from other sci-fi flicks. That doesn’t automatically make the film bad in my book, but it can be a pervasive distraction that turns my viewing experience into one long Highlights for Children puzzle. (Score one point for every borrowed element you spot! If you spot ten or more, you’re a Certified Movie Maven!) Oblivion is the second feature film from Joseph Kosinski, the director of Tron: Legacy, which was a visual wonderland and a surprisingly classy act considering it was a Disney sequel to a film I’ve disliked since I was ten. 
You’ve seen the newest trailer for Man of Steel that was just released Tuesday evening, right? The one labeled as “Trailer #3”, with lots more Jor-El in it? At least once? 
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 