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.

The Ongoing Failure of the PG-13 Rating: The Movie

In perhaps the strangest milestone of my I-guess-you-could-call-it-a-career, The Dissolve has adapted an essay of mine that they published back in December into a very clever two-and-a-half-minute animated short. Keith Phipps, who edited the original essay, wrote the script.

I'm honored. The original piece is here. Please note that it cites Guardians of the Galaxy as the top-grossing picture of 2014 in the U.S., which it was at the time of publication; Guardians was subsequently out-earned by The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 and American Sniper. Anyway, my thanks to Keith and to animators Mack Williams and Benji Williams and their team for doing such a beautiful job with this. I've embedded the video above, but please go watch it on The Dissolve, where it's accompanied by a behind-the-scenes video wherein Mack Williams pulls back the curtain on how he turned a script into a cartoon.

What the Movies Taught Us About World War II Aviation

I wrote this fun piece for my day job. It appears in our May 2015 issue of Air & Space / Smithsonian, now on sale at Barnes & Noble and other fine booksellers and newsstands, as well as the National Air & Space Museum. It's our 70th anniversary of V-E Day issue, which – because it'll be out in time for the Arsenal of Democracy Flyover on Friday, May 8th (the actual anniversary) – includes pull-out Spotter Cards you can use to identify the silhouettes of the two dozen vintage warbirds that'll be buzzing over your head a few minutes past noon if you come down to the National Mall on that day.

For the record, I do think William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives is the greatest of the films I surveyed – if not the greatest flying movie – save for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1943 masterpiece The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which I had occasion to mention only fleetingly. (The photo at the top of this post is of Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook in that film.)

Mark Harris's book Five Came Back was an invaluable resource for me while writing this story.

The Dissolve Podcast #32: The "Ecstatic Truth" Just Means "Lie" Edition

I haven't seen Alex Garland's Ex Machina yet, but I can't wait.

I was honored to be invited to join Tasha Robinson and Keith Phipps to discuss The State of Science Fiction in the movies on this week's episode of The Dissolve podcast. The also includes a discussion of documentaries and is thus named for a Werner Herzog phrase I love. A lot of ums from me, a lot of insight from Tasha and Keith. Listen here.

Prose and Retcons, or Don't Fear the Rewind, or Mulligans' Wake

"Well, everyone knows Ripley died on Fiornia-161. What this ALIEN movie presupposes is... maybe she didn't?"

I have a long, long "Exposition" essay up at The Dissolve today inspired by (uncertain) reports that District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's upcoming Alien movie may be a ret-con scenario that undoes the events of 1992's Alien-little-three, or Alien Cubed – anyway, the one where Ripley died. The piece is about retconning in fiction in general, and why it doesn't much impair my ability or inclination to suspend my disbelief at all.

If you're quite comfortable in your chair, and you're stout of heart and nerdy of temperament... Onward!

What's It All About, Chappie?

So Die Antwoord won't be releasing a cover of "Alfie" with the lyrics updated to promote their surprisingly substantial parts in Neill Blomkamp's new RoboCop / Short Circuit hybrid, Chappie? Disappointing.

But so's the movie. My NPR review is here.

Enter the Drag: Kung Fu Elliot, reviewed.

Elliot Scott is the delusional subject of a documentary by Matthew Bauckman & Jaret Belliveau.

Kung Fu Elliot, a documentary about a man who aspires to be the Canadian Chuck Norris, turns nasty enough quickly enough to call its makers' intentions into question. I reviewed the 2014 Slamdance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-winner for Documentary Feature for The Dissolve.