Yet another reminder of why I love pop culture

I was recently introduced to "Rick and Morty," an adult-oriented animated show that most geeks worth their PS4s discovered years ago. I don't need to add yet another glowing review, or detailed analysis, to an internet swimming with both. However, one of the show's most-discussed moments reminded me, quite compellingly, why I love pop culture so much. So I figured I'd write about that.

At the end of an episode titled "Auto Erotic Assimilation," in which Rick visits an old flame who turns out to be a body-snatching hive mind, the mad scientist retreats, heartbroken, to his garage-based lab. (If you haven't seen this episode, get thee to Hulu and watch it right now! And then come back here and read the rest of this post.) He removes a small, blobby alien from cryogenic deep freeze and insta-thaws it. The little creature is clearly distressed, as it likely was the instant he froze it to begin with. In a rare, and unexpectedly moving, show of compassion, Rick gently pets the poor creature.

It quickly becomes apparent that he's soothing it because he's about to zap it out of existence with one of his laser-y contraptions. After doing so, he sets the machine up to zap him -- but before it can, he slumps onto his desk. The killer beam barely misses his head. As he sleeps off yet another hangover, night turns to day, and we see Rick's son-in-law, Jerry, merrily weed-whacking the driveway just outside the garage, without a care in the world.

The tonal shift of this scene from the madcap, raunchy antics that preceded it is remarkable. The sad, beautiful song "Do You Feel It?" by Seattle indie band Chaos Chaos soundtracks the entire scene, and it perfectly complements the existentialism and emotionality on display. Wordlessly, this stunning scene humanizes Rick, helping us empathize with his loss of love and the frustration he feels as a genius surrounded by lesser minds. It also shows that he isn't simply a madman with zero regard for the welfare of other living things.

Part of what makes the scene great is the ambiguity baked into it: Did Rick mean to save his own life, or did he simply pass out before the laser energized? Did he unfreeze and kill the creature to "set it free" (rather than continuing to keep it cooped up like a lab rat)? Did he kill it because he planned to end his own life as well and wouldn't be around to take care of it?

Whatever his motivation, his tenderness toward the seemingly simple being adds depth to the character of Rick and to the show as a whole. This scene makes it obvious that Rick and Morty's interdimensional adventures, while often wacky and fun, come at a price, at least for Rick. It turns out that dating outside your species, galaxy, and reality isn't any easier than sticking to OkCupid. And being possibly the smartest human ever isn't all wine and roses.

I love how pop culture, at its best, can draw us in, get an emotional hold on us, and then upend our expectations, taking us somewhere, emotionally and otherwise, we never thought we'd go. The ending of "Auto Erotic Assimilation" blindsides you in the best way. Even within the context of a show about infinite parallel realities, this masterful scene knocks us off-balance and makes us wonder what kind of show it is, exactly, that we're growing increasingly attached to.

"Adore" captures the blissful ache of infatuation

Even though "Adore" was released as a single in 2016, the EP it ended up on, Amy Shark's "Night Thinker," didn't come out until 2017. And until this year, the Spokane area's premier indie rock station, KPND, wasn't playing it. So I'm tempted to consider it my favorite song of this year thus far. Back in 2016, after all, most of the people who fell in love with Shark's spare, sharp lyrics and achingly expressive music were her fellow Australians. Now we in the Northern Hemisphere get our shot.

"Adore" begins with three fraught guitar chords, then adds Shark's bruised-sounding voice, supported by a simple beat and subtle backing vocals. The song builds in urgency and vulnerability, all the while maintaining a loping, mid-tempo feel. The first three lines capture something vital about the desperation that accompanies a serious crush:

I'm just gonna stand with my bag hanging off my left arm
I'm just gonna walk home kicking stones at parked cars
But I had a great night, 'cause you kept rubbing against my arm

In a quick but emotionally rich three minutes, Shark communicates volumes about romantic attraction that may or may not be requited. Eleven years ago, I wrote for Seattle Weekly about the agonies and, well, further agonies of the unrequited crush. It's a universal theme, but it's the rare song that honestly describes the torturous state of wanting someone who doesn't want you back.

In "Adore," Shark certainly shows both the overflowing passion ("I want the entire street out of town just so I can be alone with you") and combative spirit  ("Watch me watch him talk to girls / I'm known as a right-hand slugger / Anybody else wanna touch my lover?") of someone who isn't entirely secure in her bond with the object of her desire. That's part of what makes the song so great: Obsession has a mighty undertow, a dark pull that can make otherwise reasonable people do unreasonable things. No unrequited-crush song worth its salt tries to pretty up the ugly side of asymmetrical attraction.

This gorgeous, pained love song would be a terrific fit for "13 Reasons Why," a show similarly concerned with infatuation that exists in tension with darkness. 2017 is far from over, but I'm not sure anyone is going to top "Adore" for raw emotional power.

Curative power

Always nice to get feedback

Not only did Grace Rex read my post about her film "This Is She," she was kind enough to tweet back, as follows:

I'll see if I can swing an (email) interview with her to post as a follow-up.

Gimmicks, tropes, and why we love them

Two horror trailers have grabbed my attention this year, but not because they're teasing some kind of innovative, genre-busting, or intellectual take on scary movies. It's because they demonstrate a combination even more addictive than Trader Joe's peanut butter cups: high concept and lowbrow. "Wish Upon" and "Happy Death Day" both set up either marginally likable or somewhat unlikable heroines using a tried-and-true trope, and it's catnip to me.

"Wish Upon" re-configures Richard Matheson's old "Button, Button" premise in which protagonists get their wishes granted, at the price of someone's death each time. Richard Kelly's "The Box" made something heady and fairly interesting of Matheson's concept, as befitted the writer-director of "Donnie Darko," but "Wish Upon" is aiming decidedly lower: at teens, and maybe even tweens who somehow sneak a horror rental into a sleepover, if those still even happen.

Star Joey King is best known for playing Ramona Quimby, fer chrissakes, so she's pulling a Selena Gomez-in-"Spring Breakers" and darkening her rep. Based on the trailer, pro tip for poor Sherilyn Fenn: Keep yer damn braid away from the garbage disposal next time! Anyway, King's character goes from zero to popular girl, lotsa people die in gratuitously gruesome ways, etc. I likely won't actually watch this dreck, but why do gimmicks grab me -- us -- so persuasively? Why do I even slightly want to watch this movie?

Maybe the answer can be found in the trailer for "Happy Death Day." Meet Tree, played by Jessica Rothe. Tree is a popular, bitchy, probably somewhat vapid sorority-type college student. Tree has a big birthday, everyone who's anyone attends, and somebody in a super-creepy mask kills her dead.

Roll credits? Nah.

See, Tree is stuck in a "Groundhog Day"-inspired time loop. She dies, she wakes up the morning of her "death day," and the whole kit and caboodle starts all over again. Fun fun! Tree has to solve her own murder, etc. ("I Don't Know Who Killed Me" -- alternate title?) Anyway, this one looks targeted at a slightly more sophisticated audience, in light of the fact that Blumhouse produced it. And it might be good fun, especially since bitchy vapid Tree gets help, evidently, from clean-scrubbed, geeky male classmates with whom I have to believe, if anything is sacred, she will mightily hook up with once he helps her save her own life from Masky McStab-Stab. But again, why is this trailer taunting me with its movie's theoretical entertainingness? Why do I want to see "Happy Death Day"?

I suspect it's mostly this: Tropes = comfort. When Blumhouse waves this particular product in front of our figurative and collective nose, we know what they're selling. So we have a general sense of the likelihood that we'll like it. That's something that's distinguished mainstream film from so-called art film for at least a few decades now. "Tree of Life" guarantees views nothing except multiple WTF moments. "Boo 2! A Madea Halloween"? The trailers are pretty much two-minute versions of the movie, and a bargain at the low, low price of free.

And yet... a movie like "Happy Death Day" also promises to have some wit up its sleeve. I wrote about horror-comedy recently, and how it's an ever-loving hassle to pull off. Well, "Happy Death Day" promises us it'll mine the existential-comedy antics of "Groundhog Day" while also tapping into the popcorn-y meta-horror of "Scream." As prepackaged products go, that sounds mighty tasty. Most moviegoers, I hope, don't want total paint-by-numbers gruel when they go to the theater or illegally download or whatever. But a familiar formula shot through with some offbeat humor -- or at least humor that's somewhat funny -- and an intelligence level that exceeds what is fundamentally necessary to plot and dialogue a film, well, that's sometimes exactly what the cinedoctor ordered. (In action, see: "Kong: Skull Island.")

We who love originality and realism in movies can also love watching old beats being skillfully hit. Not every horror movie needs to be "Get Out," and even there, Jordan Peele played with tropes. How can you not? Horror is one of cinema's tropiest genres. The worst horror flicks are built with tropes, zip ties, and fake gore. The best are much classier and, sometimes, sassier, but they're not from an entirely different family. Jump scares are scary! Shadows are shadowy! Icky-looking figures wandering slowly but unswervingly toward you are very unsettling!

Even arguably the best horror movie of the 21st century, "Cabin in the Woods," paid loving homage to the tropes it was upending. Ultimately, Pauline Kael was right: "Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them."

That new Arcade Fire album

Okay, so yes: Arcade Fire's new album, "Everything Now," is their least impressive outing in 13 years of being unparalleled indie-rock darlings. In 2004, when "Funeral" turned Pitchfork and much of the indie-admiring world weak-kneed, I'd been in Seattle (and working for Seattle Weekly) for a couple of years and was becoming aware that a few lucky indie bands, whether several albums in or after a single release, blow up. This was, after all, the year of Modest Mouse's "Good News for People Who Love Bad News" (their fourth album), whose massive smash single "Float On" elevated them to indie royalty (for a few crazy years). That same year, Franz Ferdinand's self-titled debut exploded, too. And, oh yeah, the Killers' "Hot Fuss." Holy crap was 2004 busy for indie fans. And "Funeral" added a powerful measure of dreamy, almost otherworldly storytelling and sound that was also, somehow, profoundly moving and relevant and ridiculously millennial. Album of the 2000s, and maybe of the young century thus far, thou art "Funeral."

In 2007, Arcade Fire somehow surmounted the unbelievable pressure of following up "Funeral" by releasing "Neon Bible," which was darker, satirized religion, and consisted almost entirely of irresistibly escalating, triumphal anthems (or anti-anthems, in the case of the haunting "My Body is a Cage" and "Black Wave/Bad Vibrations"). I was at the Seattle Times by then, and I still remember the version of "Neon Bible" I listened to obsessively in my trusty Discman. The track listing was markedly different from what ended up being the final, official one. "Intervention" started that alternatively ordered album, and it still seems much more appropriate than "Black Mirror" (second on that disc) as an opening track. Anyway, I fell madly in love with the gorgeous, doomy "Neon Bible," and though I will probably find, as I revisit "Funeral" now, that it's at least as strong as its predecessors, on some level Arcade Fire's sophomore set may forever be my favorite album of theirs.

"The Suburbs," in 2010, leaked out to me track by track via YouTube. "Rococo" struck me as pure, beautiful Arcade Fire bombast, a heavy, rolling destroyer of a song that more or less kicked off the band's ongoing reflection -- sometimes pretentious, sometimes self-lacerating, occasionally both -- on fame itself, and what it's like to be The Most Important Band Ever all of a sudden. "The Suburbs" won the album of the year Grammy, and it is indeed a lovely, ambitious project. As a suburban kid, and especially as one who spent most of his first 10 years in a classic American suburb (Warren, Michigan), I do think a lot of this quasi-concept album captures vital things about suburban life, including the sadness and isolation that can persist despite everyone's houses being built so damn close to each other. Parts of "The Suburbs" still grab me, but as a whole it didn't hit me as hard as the band's first two records.

"Reflektor" came out in 2013, right around the time Liz and I bought our house. I took immediately to "Joan of Arc" and "Normal Person," both of which riffed memorably on the notion that being a nonconformist misfit sucks, but the only thing worse is being a rigidly conventional, boring bully. (Basically: the plot of "Carrie," minus the firestorm.) "Afterlife" served as a lovely climax near the end of the album's dance-y, angst-y arc, and I loved the use of rhythms and sounds of Haiti (co-lead signer Regine Chassagne's ancestral homeland, which the band name-checked with a song title on "Funeral") throughout the record -- especially on "Here Comes the Night Time." After the big concept and epic sprawl of "The Suburbs," "Reflektor" couldn't help but feel like a more minor album. Still, the work and care that went into it was evident, and it had plenty of that Arcade Fire ache -- the emotional charge, the yearning, the thrilling interplay between sadness and joy.

"Everything Now" has some of it, too, but not nearly as much. Think of it as an extended EP: "Everything Now," "Creature Comfort," "Electric Blue," "Put Your Money On Me," and "We Don't Deserve Love," and you're pretty much good to go. Even critics who've ragged on the record as a whole admit that "Creature Comfort" has some of that old-time Arcade Fire magic, what with the "everybody sings at once!" wall-of-sound moments and the lyrics about body dysmorphia, low self-esteem, and suicidality. (The midsong reference to "Funeral" that so many critics found annoying strikes me as a fair poke, on the part of the band, at their debut album's long shadow and vaunted reputation as the emotional expression of an entire generation's collective angst.)

However, it's "Put Your Money On Me" and "We Don't Deserve Love" I keep coming back to. Sure, "Money" has a mix of great and dodgy lyrics ("Above the chloroform sky"? Sure! "Clouds made of ambien"? Yeah, not so much). Then there's this breathtaking run:

I know I've been different
My skin keeps shedding
My mother was crying on the day of our wedding
Trumpets of angels call for my head
But I fight through the ether and I quit when I'm dead

Oh, man. The song builds and builds and by the end the harmonies are ethereal, and yet somehow it still sounds like 21st-century ABBA. It's a mesmerizing, beautiful song. It sticks in my head.

"We Don't Deserve Love" works similarly, though it's musically pretty different. Here's where the lyrics really take off:

Mary roll away the stone
The men that you love
Always leave you alone
Go on Mary
Roll away the stone
The men you love always leave you alone
You hear your mother screaming
You hear your daddy shouting
You try to figure it out
You never figured it out
Your mother screaming that
You don't deserve love

The very band that skewered evangelical Christianity on "Neon Bible" has taken the age-old story of a mourning Mary and lifted it up movingly in its own unique style. Lead singer Win Butler's voice has always been highly expressive, but here his prolonged falsetto feels unusually vulnerable. Critics we'll never see the likes of "Funeral" again from Arcade Fire, and I understand the disappointment that surrounds their release of a decidedly nonessential record.

But the spark hasn't died out completely. From 2004 to 2013, the band's albums met me at what now seem like crucial points in my life. It's okay that many of these new songs falter. After producing so much music that's filled with passionate but ambiguous feelings and surprising, creative stories and ideas, these guys deserve some grace. And hey, three new songs that stand up to repeat listening are definitely better than none.

"Watch Out" and the way humor works in horror

Humor and horror can make for a queasy mix. Too many straight-ahead horror movies treat human lives like trash, thanks in part to the "Saw" and "Hostel" franchises but going back to Z-grade slashers and gorefests from many decades past. Trying to blend humor with horror tropes can make a fairly insensitive, dehumanizing horror flick seem downright mean-spirited.

When dark humor works well in horror, however, the results can be thrilling, as in remarkable films like "The Cabin in the Woods" and "Get Out" and honorable mentions such as "Ginger Snaps" and "Tucker & Dale vs. Evil." In the best-case scenario, humor makes the horror more palatable while also developing and humanizing the characters and delivering a more memorable, and meaningful, narrative. When horror-comedy works, it really works; when it doesn't, well, sometimes we get "Leprechaun in the Hood."

"Watch Out," a short film available on Hulu via the NBCUniversal Short Film Festival ("a bicoastal program seeking the next generation of writers, directors, producers and actors, while celebrating innovative storytelling from diverse backgrounds"), isn't "Cabin in the Woods"-level awesome -- but hey, few movies are. However, it deftly presents itself as one thing -- straight horror -- before downshifting to some surprisingly light-on-its-feet comedy, then lingering in the Venn diagram overlap space for a bit longer than you expect.

"Watch Out" takes a simple premise -- definitely a "Why didn't I think of that?" kind of setup -- and makes considerable hay. The film succeeds primarily because it follows the No. 1 rule of horror-comedy: Violence itself is rarely funny, but people's responses to violence, and its direct aftermath, definitely can be. Situational and/or character-based dark comedy goes a much longer way, most of the time, than trying to make plain ol' gore hilarious.