Two Cool Things This Week in Pop Culture:

The new U2 album and the “Watchmen” movie.

U2’s new disc came out first so I’ll start with that.

I’ll admit, I was leery when a bunch of the fawning pre-release reviews came out and said the same thing: This is an album that improves on increased listenings. I’m thinking, Christ, I listened to “Sister Christian” enough times in the ’80s to think it was a good song; telling me that repeated listenings will improve my listening experience is like saying that several days without food or water will make my next meal that much tastier. I could be eating a crap sandwich and it would taste like one of those $6 Burger King hamburgers that give you a heart attack before you pull out of the drive-through.

But I do a lot of recreational writing in the mornings so it’s a good time to listen to music, even music that has to be beaten into you to be appreciated.

So that’s what I did and guess what? “No Line On The Horizon” really pulls itself together upon repetition. Like “Grace Under Pressure” by Rush and “The Boatman’s Call” by Nick Cave (just two off the top of my head), I was underwhelmed by the albums on the first couple of listens but have since come to love them both. Same with this.

The last couple of U2 records seemed a bit desperate affairs to me. For every “Kite” or “City of Blinding Lights” there was two or three calculated, arena-ready anthems like “Beautiful Day,” “Vertigo” and “Elevation.” Songs that would have been cool coming from a lesser band, but U2 doing it, it just seemed to me their work was showing. Not that they couldn’t write great songs anymore, but that that wasn’t the priority. Their priority at the time, admittedly, was “We’re here to reclaim the title of greatest rock and roll band in the world.” And to do that, I guess they needed a couple of albums loaded with mostly middle-of-the-road music to move them units off the store shelves.

Happily, they’re back in rare form with the new disc, although I still hit the ‘skip’ button every time I get to the first single, “Get On Your Boots.” It seems like a left-over from when they were writing songs designed solely to rouse lethargic concert-goers to their undiscriminating feet. Or a discard from the “Pop” sessions.

For most of the album, I have no idea what Bono’s singing about (that usually comes later for me) but the songs roll into each other like movements in a symphony. Some of the banal lyrics that have been criticized in other reviews actually work me for in the context of this suite of songs. They make it easy for me to shut out the content and just admire the delivery system. And the delivery system is a thing of real beauty.

Here’s an example – there’s a song called, “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” that on its face seems like just another shameless call for a hypothetical audience to sing along with a mindless party-anthem chorus. Oh and the lyrics are pretty lame too, but then the song does this very cool, very unexpected thing: The chorus builds and builds, crescendoing with ‘I know I’ll go crazy if I don’t go crazy tonight!’ in full roar and just at the place where there ought to be a major, crashing power chord to put an exclamation point to all the mindless excitement preceding it, the music evaporates like a popped ambient soap bubble. It’s really cool, and it’s probably an example of what the reviewers who are calling this CD ‘experimental’ are talking about.

For me, it’s more a return to form than anything wildly new and different. They sound looser than they have since “Achtung Baby” and “Zooropa.” Actually, if this album has any direct antecedent, it’s The Passengers project they did in the 1990s with Brian Eno and Pavoratti. “No Line On The Horizon” is the sound of four men finally free to be themselves again.

So that’s the skinny. If you’re inclined towards U2 but aren’t sure about this record, go ahead and buy it, but buy the whole thing (as opposed to sampling tracks on iTunes and downloading just a few). I think it might just fall apart if not appreciated in its full context.

The other cool new thing I liked this week was “Watchmen,” the movie.

I was one of the kids in 1986-87 who haunted his comic book store every fourth week to pick up the latest issue of the source material of this movie. It was really involved, advanced reading. The storytelling and the thinking that went into it, you couldn’t just read it on the bus home. It was like “The Wire” in that way. Clear my schedule, hold my calls, I’m going to read the new issue of “Watchmen” now.

Twenty-some years later, a movie version arrives, and for me it kicked total ass.

The comic book elements were delivered in a SOCK! BIF! BANG! kind of way that was wonderfully choreographed, lit, shot and edited. The sex scene featured not only some perky female nudity but was set to a Leonard Cohen tune as well (I don’t think Leonard was in the comic book, but the sex was). The naked blue guy had a penis, just like a naked blue guy ought to. Everything about the comic-to-movie translation just clicked for me.

I even thought the characters were well-drawn (contrary to reports I have read in other reviews), especially considering at the end of the day, this is a comic book movie we’re talking about. At two hours and forty minutes, every major character had a chance to shine.

And oh my God, Jackie Earle Haley as one of the self-styled Watchmen was amazing. Especially in his unmasked scenes. I wouldn’t be surprised if he grabbed another supporting actor nomination. He was that good. He was totally like a young Clint Eastwood – young, but as grizzled and growly as Clint is today. Really, it was a hell of a performance.

Now, some of my fellow geeks are buzzing about changes made to the story by the filmmaker. Let me just say, without those changes, they would have had to have added a whole ’nother subplot, which would have sunk the film’s running time. And I thought the way they integrated the plot-change into the narrative and logic of the story was seamlessly organic.

Really, if they had wanted to do the slavishly-accurate version of the story that we comic nerds would have ideally liked to have seen, it would have to have been done as a major HBO limited series. But they didn’t do it that way, so for what they did do, I thought they did a great job. Director Zach Snyder (“300”) is two-for-two in my book.

“Watchmen” is a genuine summer blockbuster, generously served up to us in the cinematic doldrums of the first week of March. I’d recommend it for anyone who is familiar with the source material, likes action/adventure movies in general or even just naked blue men with penises.