AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

Whatever your feelings about Avengers: Age of Ultron, even if your feelings can be summed up in a succinct "Meh," you can't say that writer/director Joss Whedon is merely giving audiences an exact replica of 2012's comic-book behemoth The Avengers. There's some romance here, for one thing. There's also a lot more plot, now that we're spared its predecessor's hour-plus of super-team origin story. And rather than being granted all of his film's best, most thrillingly unexpected moments, that rampaging mass of CGI id known as the Hulk is instead stuck with the worst scene in the movie - which, unfortunately, also happens to be its most prototypical one.

EX MACHINA

If you're a fellow fan of the high-tech Twilight Zone that is the BBC's Black Mirror and last year's Christmas special with Jon Hamm didn't sate your craving for more, you won't want to miss the sci-fi creep-out Ex Machina. (If you're not a fan of Black Mirror, which is currently streaming on Netflix, you clearly haven't watched it yet. Get cracking.) Like a 105-minute episode of that haunting anthology series, Alex Garland's quasi-futuristic morality fable boasts a simple premise that grows more complicated and nightmarish as it progresses. Also like a super-sized Black Mirror, the experience leaves you feeling a little shaken and happily freaked out, and kind of antsy to see it again.

Near the end of our recent interview, I ask David Casas a question that, I think, most people would want to ask a professional magician who spends much of his time making doves appear and disappear: "Has anything really awful ever happened during your act?"

He smiles and replies: "The only thing that's really happened was at one of my first shows. Every time I used to produce a bird, I would always hold them close to me. So I was doing that at one show, and people started laughing, but I didn't know what they were laughing at. So I just kept going with my act, and they kept laughing, and I think I went to grab a silk or something ... . And then I see this big line of bird poop running down my coat.

"And I was like, 'Oh-h-h-h ... now I get it,'" says Casas. "I just shook my head and said, 'That'll happen with birds,' and kept going, you know? And I learned that when I produce the bird, I need to hold it out."

Music

Rittz

Rock Island Brewing Company

Saturday, April 18, 9 p.m.

If you're blue and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go to RIBCO? It's ... puttin' on the Rittz!

That intro's probably more clever if you sing it in rhythm to the Fred Astaire song. Please don't make me tell you which one.