Pop Culture Happy Hour: The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Pop-Culture Pariahs

Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth are 40 percent of Earth's Mightiest Heroes. (Marvel)

On this week's Pop Culture Happy Hour, I join host Linda Holmes and regular panelists Stephen Thompson and Glen Weldon to dissect Joss Whedon's super-packed super-sequel The Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Then we talk about what makes a pop culture pariah, or Why I Will Always Stick Up for James Cameron and U2 no matter what you or, more to the point, they say. This wasn't the place for me to go into about how U2 brilliantly satirized their own inflated post-The Joshua Tree celebrity while promoting their best album, 1991's Achtung Baby, and in the subsequent 1992-3 ZOO TV Tour, the stadium-rock spectacle so dazzlingly smart and subversive that no one has yet surpassed it – not even U2, though they have tried.

You can get a little taste of all that in the 1992 video below, if you dare.

And here they are 23 years later, having some fun with the Central Park bike accident last fall that landed Bono in the hospital for months and forced their planned weeklong, Songs of Innocence-promoting Tonight Show residency to be scrubbed. Also check out their performance of "Angel of Harlem" with The Roots, holy cow.

Show Me No Money: Trust Me, reviewed.

Saxon Sharbino and Clark Gregg in Trust Me, which Gregg wrote and directed.

Trust Me, the second feature film written and directed by Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. star Clark Gregg, confounds pretty much any expectation you're likely to bring to it. I reviewed it for The Dissolve.