David in the 1951 Biblical movie David and Bathsheba, by Henry King, is not a man of much religious fervor, as the real David must have been.

The film is more serious about grief and sin and doubt than other old Hollywood movies, but it needs a major jolt of energy.  It’s rather wan and slow-moving, and neither Gregory Peck nor Susan Hayward is particularly interesting in the title roles.  It is a sure thing that Hollywood’s Biblical flicks provided an excuse for injecting sensuality into American film, so some of that is certainly here, courtesy of a dancing Gwen Verdon (uncredited) and to a lesser extent of Hayward.  Verdon, however, is part of the padding we frequently get from this movie.

I like that Jenny Offill’s novel, Dept. of Speculation (2014), is short and has short paragraphs.  Sans a plot, it concerns the marriage and motherhood of an unnamed woman writer, and although I lack interest in what it, or any other contemporary novel, has to say about writers, the mother-and-child stuff is clever and incisive.  Even better is what James Wood has observed about the book:  “If it is a distressed account of a marriage in distress, it is also a poem in praise of the married state.”

The woman’s husband has an affair and so, yes, there is distress, but a positive ending occurs as well.

“Why doesn’t she throw the bum out?” some people might ask.  I don’t know; this is a novel and novels are about how human beings think and behave, and women often don’t throw the bum out, even if they should.

Six Western stories make up the new Netflix film by Joel and Ethan Coen—The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)—and in toto it is terrific.  My favorite is probably the touching, beautifully acted “The Gal Who Got Rattled” starring Zoe Kazan as a nice young woman in a heap of trouble.  It is rather less odd than some of the other stories but no less entertaining than the farcical title story or the one (“Near Algodones”) wherein James Franco enacts a crook consistently on the precipice of capital punishment.

The Coens’ tales are penny dreadfuls in which they often double down on Western mythology (Tim Blake Nelson‘s gunslinger, the shooting of Tom Waits‘s prospector).  Mythology, yes, but violence is still violence.  It abounds here:  the violence that brings about death.  When the film isn’t funny, it is deeply unsettling, and has a No Country for Old Men harshness.  I nervously enjoyed it.

Cover of December Boys

Greatness in English-language cinema is so blasted rare these days and, sure enough, we don’t find it in the Australian December Boys (2006), a Rod Hardy picture about four boys from a Catholic orphanage and their seaside vacation.  The flick is based on a novel by one Michael Noonan.  Why did Hardy think it needed to be filmed?  Or was he commissioned to film it?  December Boys–the movie–is distinctly unimportant.  I rather like that it’s eccentric, and it doesn’t even come close to being anti-Catholic, but as well it is sometimes silly and too incident-filled.  The Australian director Bruce Beresford (Tender Mercies, Breaker Morant, Black Robe) once cared about cinematic greatness, even if he didn’t always achieve it. The Aussies behind Hardy’s film, if Aussies all of them are, do not.

Since in the United States we will always have a welfare system, it might as well be one that is generous and efficient apropos of nursing homes.  Medicaid makes it hard for lower middle-class families, unable to afford nursing home costs, to receive assistance, and continually pays the nursing homes insufficiently—when, that is, it doesn’t overpay them, and this too has been a problem.

Why not discontinue Medicaid’s health funding for the poor and simply help them through cash payments (a universal basic income)?  Why not have Medicaid, if we even want it to exist, provide nursing home vouchers to citizens making less than . . . what?  $80,000 a year?  Sounds good to me.  In fact, the vouchers could be not specifically for nursing home costs but for a life insurance policy since the money from such a policy can be used for long-term medical care.

We need to be wise with our money or medical welfarism, in itself, will shrink drastically.  Yes, I desire smaller government, but even more do I desire less wayward and more compassionate government.