The Bin – 4/23/10

The Bin – 4/23/10

Apr 23

It’s that time again — time to cram every bit of awesome and sort-of-awesome and maybe-not-as-awesome-but-shit-we-need-to-fill-up-some-space from the past week into one tidy little feature. We call it…The Bin!

Stuff We Like this Week

Sarah: Matthew Sweet’s music is a beautiful sort of time machine, always transporting me back to my angsty-yet-hopeful high school/college days in an instant. He can lament a break-up with the best of them, but one of my favorite things about his music is his ability to capture that glorious, heady mix of “oh, yay/oh, fuck” that goes with falling in love — and still believing in love, no matter how many times it screws you over. As soon as I heard that Girlfriend — a new boy-meets-boy romantic musical featuring songs from Sweet’s seminal album of the same name — existed, I simply had to go. I have tickets for next month, I have a dear college friend set to accompany me, and I have Sweet’s songs in a loop on my iPod. In re-listening to his impressive power pop oeuvre, I’ve realized something — my touchstone song isn’t from Girlfriend. Rather, it’s “Sick of Myself,” the first track off of 1995’s crunchy-guitared 100% Fun, a three-and-a-half minute ode to yearning for and fixating on That One Perfect Person. I can connect a lot of Sweet’s music to general periods in my life; I can connect this song to specific moments. Happily, I hear it’s one of the few non-Girlfriend tracks included in the show. I like this a whole lot.

Jeff: Alex Zalben and Gurihiru really knock it out of the park with their first collaboration on the all-ages Power Pack comics at Marvel, Thor and the Warriors Four. I don’t think people realize how good the various PP comics – penned first by Marc Sumerak and Fred Van Lente – have consistently been, because we treat the Power Pack like it’s kind of a joke now. I was a kid at the time that Power Pack was around the first time, and it was never a joke – it was fun.  The past few years worth of Power minis have recaptured that tone perfectly. I just read the first issue of the latest one – Thor and the Warriors Four, and it has the Pack teaming up with the Pet Avengers to fight Asgardian wolf monsters to save the Powers’ grandmother’s life. It is as good as you’d expect (the solicitation for the fourth issue teases “The League of Thors” and that makes me freak out a bit). Zalben doesn’t get the same level of kudos that Paul Tobin, Colleen Coover and Jeff Parker have for creating a great all-ages Marvel universe, but that’s due to change.

Chris: I cannot tell you how pleased I am that Kick-ass did not take it’s opening weekend, and that it essentially became the super-hero movie equivalent of Snakes On A Plane… all hype, no hurry to the box-office. Don’t misunderstand; It did OK, and looking at certain stats, it did well, and there are always records to be broken, even under the worst of circumstances (In this case, it got boiled down to “Best opening weekend in it’s sub-genre ever”, meaning, apparently, “Best opening weekend for a super-hero dark comedy.”) But it got beat, after weeks of Internet buzz, by an animated movie about dragons… in its fourth weekend. That equals a fail.

Also don’t misunderstand me, I have nothing against Mark Millar, other than his work. I’m sure if I met him, he’d be an OK guy… that writes the worst, nihilistic, un-reverential, condequence-free comic drivel that suggests a deep personality flaw, and in time that flaw would make me hate him personally. For now, it’s just his comics, which are, to put it another way I’m-The-Goddamned-Batman awful.

Here, one more time, one more angle; to turn Wanted into a Hollywood film, they had to change the story so that the international cabal of ASSASSINS were actually good people who thought they were doing good things by killing people, but were actually tricked by mean old Morgan Freeman into doing baaaad killings. And that’s what they figured was the NICER version of his story.

I dropped The Authority because of him, because he loved telling the stories that killed millions, but never had the interest or follow-through to deal with that fact. We know what happens when hundreds of thousands die over months in a war, or thousands die in an instant in a tragedy… how can millions die instantly in a cataclysm and nobody bats an eye?

I know Kick-ass will make its money back and even profit. I know Millar will take home a little change from it. But it did not make him a newly minted powerhouse one-hit-wonder in Hollywood. And for that I am grateful.

Oh, and kids seem to like the movie, so I’m also weeping for the future. OK, that’s it for this week.

Link Stew

Our friend Max Riffner introduced us to this amazing “safety” video.

Speaking of Max, his webcomic, “Drunk Elephant,” has been on a freakin’ roll lately. Loan-Bot! Hot Nerd boy! Xs for eyes to indicate drunkenness!

NPR’s Monkey See blog explains why the term “hipster” no longer means anything. (Hat tip to Caroline.)

DC gave away a new, greener Green Lantern ring and a Flash ring last week – if you have not gotten one, go talk to your local comic shop. If you’re lucky, your guy just wants to unload them fast – others may be sticklers about making you buy the comic.

Etc.

Play us out, Matthew.