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.

Four men should have come up with a more agreeable plot than that which exists in the Bob Hope comedy, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number (1966), directed well enough by George Marshall.  In silly ways a movie star, Didi, is used to move the plot along, but the screenwriters finally acquit themselves with Hope’s one-liners and much of the fun slapstick.

Hope plays a real estate agent who foolishly helps Didi, the sexy actress who runs away from the movie industry, all the while necessarily trying to conceal this from his wife.  With Wrong Number, Hollywood produced a family film that tries for mid-60s sophistication through one person only:  Elke Sommer (Didi).  Though offering no surprises, she is quite good in her role, and her bare legs are good in theirs.  But there is no smut; there is commercial appeal, rickety as the whole thing is.  And there is funny Hope figuring that Phyllis Diller must tend to her looks with an egg beater.

Four men should have come up with a more agreeable plot than that which exists in the Bob Hope comedy, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number (1966), directed well enough by George Marshall.  In silly ways a movie star, Didi, is used to move the plot along, but the screenwriters finally acquit themselves with Hope’s one-liners and much of the fun slapstick.

Hope plays a real estate agent who foolishly helps Didi, the sexy actress who runs away from the movie industry, all the while necessarily trying to conceal this from his wife.  With Wrong Number, Hollywood produced a family film that tries for mid-60s sophistication through one person only:  Elke Sommer (Didi).  Though offering no surprises, she is quite good in her role, and her bare legs are good in theirs.  But there is no smut; there is commercial appeal, rickety as the whole thing is.  And there is funny Hope figuring that Phyllis Diller must tend to her looks with an egg beater.

The 2018 film Chappaquiddick treats Senator Ted Kennedy as though he were a very unscrupulous tragic hero save he doesn’t die at the end, which is significant.  Kennedy goes on living, after dopily getting together with Mary Jo Kopechne and driving her to her doom:  oxygen deprivation in a car underwater.  “Kopechne died because Kennedy dithered” (Daniel Oliver), and after this, a true tragic hero would have died, perhaps by suicide.

This is not to say that John Curran‘s film isn’t a good one; it is.  Sympathy goes to Kopechne—how could it not?—but even more of it goes to Kennedy, and one may be in high dudgeon over this.  Yet it should be remembered that by consorting with Kennedy poor Mary Jo was going off with a married man.  It was a grave mistake.

Jason Clarke, though, portrays Kennedy not only as a tragic hero but also as a fool, in a nicely subdued performance.  I suspect that director Curran did not work that thoroughly with his actors—they don’t always own their roles—but there’s no problem with Clancy Brown, who shows intelligent fire as Robert MacNamara, or a palatable Ed Helms.  It’s about time someone made a movie about the Liberal Lion of the Senate’s failure to be charitable to a doomed girl.

Dennis Hopper‘s The Hot Spot is a lurid sex ‘n’ violence medley from 1990.

Its pulp story is second-rate with its mad, insatiable Virginia Madsen character and excessively defeated blackmailer (William Sadler).  Hopper wants us to have a good time, however, primarily through scenes of nudity, so it’s a pretty low enterprise.  It would be, anyway, even if the utterly enticing yet innocent looks of Jennifer Connelly call for a favorable comment.  Even so, she and Madsen are certifiably limited here as actors, and Don Johnson is miscast as a smart, greedy drifter-thief.  Hopper may have been a bit corrupted by playing in Blue Velvet.