(Dis)honesty: The Truth About Lies, reviewed.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has tested the honesty of some 40,000 subjects.

My reivew of (Dis)honesty: The Truth About Lies, a new documentary based on the research of "behavioral ecnomomist" Dan Airely, is up at The Dissolve today.

What Fresh Hell! Mad Max: Fury Road, reviewed.

Tom Hardy & Charlize Theron play the dual protagonists of the fourth, and best, Max Max.

Melting clocks would not look out of place in the surreal and vibrant post-apocalyptic world George Miller has created in Mad Max: Fury Road, the long-delayed fourth installment in the series that launched his eclectic career 36 years ago. (Four Max Maxes now, but also two Babes and two Happy Feet.) Among its other substantial achievements, the film elevates Charlize Theron into the Sigourney Weaver-Linda Hamilton-Carrie Anne Moss Action Heroine Hall of Fame. Last year was an unusually strong one for blockbusters, but Fury Road is still the baddest to burn rubber and spit fire in many nuclear winters. My NPR review is here.

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.

The Overlook'd Hotel: very still and hard to see, reviewed.

Yasmin Tuazon and friends. (C. Stanley Photography)

I often admire the work Rorschach Theatre Company does, but I struggled with their latest offering, an atmospheric but impenetrable production of Steve Yockey's very still and hard to see. My review is in today's Washington City Paper.

Cheks Mix: Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike & Uncle Vanya, reviewed.

We've got an An-ton of Chekhov in DC just now, what with Arena Stage doing Christopher Durang's Tony Award-winning, Chekhov-inflected Sonia and Masha and Vanya and Spike, while Round House Theatre has put together a sublime new Uncle Vanya, working from Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Baker's recent translation of the play.

I review both of those in today's Washington City Paper. I have seen Live Art DC's staged-in-a-bar Drunkle Vanya yet, but it's stumbling distance from my apartment so I should find the time.

FURTHER READING: My 2010 review of Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation. My 2011 review of Sydney Theatre Company's Liv Ullmann-directed, Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving-starring Uncle Vanya. My 2012 review of Baker's The Aliens. My 2013 review of Aaron Posner's Stupid Fucking Bird, and its follow-up, from earlier, this year, Life Sucks, or the Present Ridiculous. Surely that's more than enough.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: The Comedians and Cameos

The new F/X series The Comedians, and the cameo appearance, are the topics of today's Pop Culture Happy Hour, which I was delighted as always to be a part of even though it means I don't get to do the Daredevil episode. 

On the cameo side, I came in prepared to sing the praises of Anchorman 2's crazypants climactic melee, a 12-way brawl wherein stars Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Steve Carrell, and Larry Miller throw down with Sasha Baron Cohen, Kanye West, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Jim Carrey, Marion Cotillard (!), Will Smith, Kirsten Dunst, Liam Neeson, Harrison Ford, and John C. Reilly as the Ghost of "Stonewall" Jackson.

If our discussion of cameos makes me a little nostalgic, maybe it's because the very first thing I had published on NPR's website was a dissection, which I co-wrote with my Pal-for-Life and full-time Pop Culture Happy Hour panelist Glen Weldon, of the cameo-rich 1978 comic book Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali.

Also, I wish I'd taken a moment during my encomium to Bengies Drive-In Theatre to explain what sorts of movies are best-served in its wonderfully anachronistic outdoors environs: Not the must-see pictures you're seeing for the first time, but the movies you kinda-sorta want to see but probably would not pay $14 for. At Bengies, you can see two or three movies for $10 a head, remember. It's 53 miles from my apartment in DC, so factoring in $10 for gas, and another Hamilton-spot for an Outside Food & Beverage Permit – $10 per car, on the honor system, but c'mon, we want this family-owned-and-operated independent cinema to stay afloat – you still get away for about the same amount you'd spend on a double-feature at a Regal Cinemas. And you see the movies in a more unique, welcoming, lightning bug-enhanced environment.

Last summer, I saw The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and 22 Jump Street on a double-bill there. The summer before that, I caught a triple-feature of Brave, Moonrise Kingdom (essential, but it was my second viewing), and Ted. Those are the kinds of movies that flourish in a setting where you may not catch every line or even every scene. Furious 7 is ideal for the drive-in.

FURTHER READING: My March 2014 Dissolve review of Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (Super-Sized, R-Rated Edition).

On Around Town, talking Laugh, Man of La Mancha, The Originalist, and Soon.

My regimen of smiling and sentence-speaking practice continues as I join host Robert Aubry Davis and Washington Post arts writer Jane Horwitz for another Around Town panel discussion of what's happening on stage here in Our Nation's Capitol and its close suburbs. In this batch of videos, which have also been airing irregularly on your public television, we discuss three shows I reviewed for the Washington City Paper and one I didn't: Beth Henley's homage to silent film comedies Laugh, the Shakespeare Theatre's new production of the classic musical Man of La Mancha, Arena Stage's world premiere play about divisive Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, The Originalist, and Soon, a new musical about the end of the world, kind of, at Signature Theatre.

These links no longer play nice with my blogging platform, so they're not embeddable.

Laugh

http://watch.weta.org/video/2365462454/

Soon

http://watch.weta.org/video/2365462413/

Man of La Mancha

http://watch.weta.org/video/2365462437/

The Originalist

http://watch.weta.org/video/2365462393/