Likable but foul-mouthed, comedian Aziz Ansari has turned up on Netflix with a new standup special (Right Now), and it’s political, provocative and silent about Trump.  For a long time he demolishes identity politics and white p.c.  Departing from this, he has a point about one black guy after another being consigned to jail for smoking weed, but is also inspired to say, “Say what you will about racist people, but they’re usually very brief.  Newly woke white people are exhausting!”  Ansari’s later material (about family and birth control devices), however, is weaker.  Not quite unfunny but weaker.  To me, Aziz Ansari Right Now is usually hilarious but whose language, alas, is intermittently disgraceful.  More disgraceful than when I identify something liberal as bullshit.

What on earth am I hearing these days, in 2019, on contemporary pop radio?  It is not at all like it was in the past, even the recent past.

Granted, Taylor Swift’s “Me” and the Jonas Brothers’ “Sucker” are fun, but—well, there’s also “Better Now” by one Post Malone.  That the lyrics are trivial wouldn’t matter much if the melody was any good.  It isn’t.  Pink’s “Walk Me Home” is a decent album cut, but as a radio-played single, it too quickly becomes boring.  The Ed Sheeran-Justin Bieber song, “I Don’t Care,” sounds like a million other ditties, while Andy Grammar’s “Give Love” is sentimental dullsville.  As for Marshmello’s “Happier,” I don’t like the singing on it, and the song has no real hooks.  “Dancing with a Stranger,” by Sam Smith, puts me to sleep.  ALL of this stuff puts me to sleep.  And, I should add, all of it is emanating from a local radio station that was never interested in playing Jewel’s “Two Hearts Breaking” or any of the singles from Kelly Clarkson’s All I Ever Wanted album except “Already Gone.”  Thanks, guys.

Predictably, the hit movie Spy Kids spawned a sequel, Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002), both directed by Robert Rodriguez.  It’s another techno-fantasy for the entire family, featuring Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara), spy kids employed by the OSS, which, as you know, eventually became the CIA.

Er, wait a minute—the OSS in Spy Kids 2 is fictional; it isn’t the CIA.  Okay, but there is still a mission here, now that a highly destructive device has been stolen and is located on a now oddball island.  A scientist there (Steve Buscemi) is given to both miniaturizing animals and creating hybrid animals which, however droll, grow to deluxe size.  (Not good.)  For good measure, Carmen and Juni confront rivals in fellow spy kids Gary and Gerti Giggles, capable of outdoing our child heroes but also facing a disadvantage.  They get their faces soiled with camel manure and their father (Mike Judge) turns out to be an appalling traitor and would-be murderer.  When he protests over how things are going, his daughter Gerti, disgusted with him, says, “Don’t even start, Dad!”

I’m glad Rodriguez started the Spy Kids trilogy.  In addition to having an entertaining cast, SK2 is comically rich and visually endearing.  And, thankfully, it has nothing to say.

I return now to episodes of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, in proper black and white.

From Season 3, we have “It’s a Good Life,” which Serling adapted from a short story.  It presents us with an Ohio town where a six-year-old boy (Bill Mumy) possesses hair-raising supernatural powers.  He is a malign “god”:  for inhabitants under a malign god, life is not worth living.  The townspeople are continually obsequious to the boy, nervous over his every whim.  It is too much for some folks to even take in.

The piece is as dark as so many short stories have been.  Rather less dark but still eerie is Serling’s “Mirror Image,” from TZ‘s dandy first season.  It is the show’s great doppelganger episode, offering Vera Miles as a woman at a bus depot whose “twin” has been appearing before other people there.  Why hasn’t Miles seen this doppelganger?  Because it (no, she) is choosing to be elusive.  Either she is up to something or she likes to play pranks.  Entertainingly peculiar, “Mirror Image” is painstakingly directed by John Brahm.

There was never any point in calling the Ibsen play, A Doll House, a feminist work; it is neither feminist nor anti-feminist.  But we can be confident in calling the Gillian Armstrong film, The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992), a feminist work.  Though nearly as complex as A Doll House, this is precisely what it is; and it’s artistically sound.

An Australian film written by Helen Garner, it deals with a feminist writer, Beth, married (because of pregnancy) to a Frenchman, J.P. (Bruno Ganz).  Both Beth and J.P. were once opposed to marriage in principle, and Beth tells a friend, “I had to buy my own wedding ring.”  We feel safe in assuming, though, that J.P. is not the kind of man disposed to buy a wedding ring.  Although charming, he is frequently selfish as well as needling and unreasonable.  Some of what he says about Beth is probably true (he comments, “You were proud, I made you humble”—but at such a cost to Beth!); still, the woman is betrayed by both J.P. and Beth’s sister Vicki (Kerry Fox).  And Beth is basically admirable.  Lisa Harrow plays her magnificently, supplying the woman’s maturity, bemusement, vulnerability, outrage.  But then all the actors are stellar.

Garner writes good dialogue and creates surprising and unusual details.  There is limited narration.  Gillian Armstrong—and editor Nicholas Beauman—are responsible for a fluid cinematic undertaking.  During a walk with J.P., Beth rapidly shifts from good spirits to fury as the camera moves in for a tight shot of the couple, then reveals them at a bit of a distance.  They silently walk back to their home, and it almost seems like a trudging—to trouble.  The last days of chez nous.  It is a formidable scene in a fine motion picture.