#Movie #Review #Babylon is Plotless, Vulgar and Long

Director Damien Chazelle brings to the screen a three-hour and nine minute film depicting a pivotal and interesting time in movie history: the difficult transition from silent films to "talkies." 

The problem is that, despite a star studded cast, the film puts vulgar sensationalism above all else, including a complete lack of plot structure and emotional resonance. In what is clearly meant to be both a love letter and expose of 1920s Hollywood instead comes across as a vulgar, plotless jumble of scenes that don't fit together very well.

Brad Pitt is the fitional Jack Conrad, a wildly successful silent film actor whose career is in rapid decline. He takes a young Mexican man, Manny Torres, played well by Diego Calva, under his wing, and he moves quickly into the film industry, which is in its infancy in the early 1920s.

Conrad and Torres first meet at a wild, debauched Hollywood party in the mid 1920s. There, they both meet Nellie La Roy, played by Margot Robbie, who is a wanna-be actress who crashes the party and also quickly crashes into the movie industry. 

The party sets the tone for the film, featuring sexual debauchery and drug use. I always notice incongruities in period pieces, and the entire crowd at the party wiggling freestyle, like it's 2020, seemed completely out of place. Even the music seems like 1940s jazz, not music from the 1920s. Not once did a character dance the Charleston or the foxtrot. Instead Robbie's character performed over-sexualized dances that wouldn't be seen on dance floors for another 60 or 70 years. 

Later, when she miraculously is inserted into a movie set, she is told to dance, and does the same thing, causing one of the male actors in the scene to have an erection in full view of the director.

I had to stop myself at that point and think about the time period of the film, and she may be on more solid ground than I first realized, because this was before the Motion Picture Production code came into effect in 1934. 

Late 1920s films were quite a bit more sexualized and violent than later time periods, and the movie industry, fearing government regulation was on the way, implemented a voluntary code of conduct that govern the film industry into the late 1960s.

None of this, of course, is explained in this film, but it does touch on the terrible working conditions for extras, the rauchous parties (though it's hard to believe that what the director portrays here actually occurred) and the racism of early Hollywood faced by minorites. Though a Hispanic man, an Asian woman, and a black man seem to have easily entered the Hollywood system in this film. Perhaps too easily.

A good chunk of the film attempts to tell the story of the difficult transition from silent films to films with sound. Some actors, like Conrad and La Roy (whose thick New Jersey accent pegs her as "low class") don't make the transition. 

Jean Smart plays a savvy Hollywood gossip reporter who breaks the news to Conrad that his career is ending. Her soliloquy about Hollywood and the fact that those existing on film will live forever is one of the high points of the film. and succeeds in1 giving it some heart. 

But such high points have to compete with the raunchy humor of an elephant pooping on a man's head, Robbie's character barfing on a man's expensive rug, and a man being urinated on during the opening party scene. 

A scene in which Conrad and a colleague are ushed into an underground club of sorts by a gangster played by Tobey Maguire, features a would-be actor biting a rat in half could have been easily cut.

Because the director is trying to tell 10 stories at once, we hear about Sidney, a black jazz musician played by Jovan Adepo, whom Torres put in a movie of his own, but is quickly alienated by Hollywood when he, a somewhat light-skinned man, is told to put on black face in order to blend in with the other black musicians. This, like several other tales here, is only briefly mentioned as if they are SNL sketches.

Another character that flies into the film and quickly out again without much exposition is Lady Fay Zhu, played by Li Jun Li, a dialogue card designer for the silent films, who also checks the 2020s diversity box as a sultry lesbian caberet singer.

Chazelle wraps up this epically long film with a bizarre and oddly hurried ending that attempts to show the demise of the actors after Hollywood's transition to talkies. 

No spoilers here, but there are a few tragic ends in the film, just as there were tragedies in old Hollywood. 

The entirely predictable death of an actor, the death of a movie extra at the hands of another extra wielding actual weapons during a battle scene, an actor who overdoses at the opening party, and a sound technician on an early sound stage are all quickly touched on but aren't significant to the plot, because there basically is no plot here, to speak of.

The entire film could have been shortened by 45 minutes and still been understood, especially if the director had narrowed his focus to a single plot. Instead, he was so enamored with shocking his audience that he forgot to include one.

Madeleine Albright Never Paid For Her War Crime

Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has died. She was 84 years old.

When, during the ill-fated 1999 Kosovo War, she threatened Serbia with a bombing campaign if they refused to sign a treaty which effectively gave up their sovereignty (which they eventually were forced to do) she broke international law, specifically, The 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

"These are not conventional negotiations. The threat of NATO air strikes remains real." said Albright, on Feb. 14, 1999, to Serbs in Rambouillet, France during treaty negotiations.

However, The Convention on the Law of Treaties, (Article 51) reads:

"A treaty is void if its conclusion has been procured by the threat or use of force in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations." 

And she surely knew this when she made that statement. Yet, she survived until her old age without facing a war crimes tribunal. Sad.

Incidentally, I documented all of this in real time back in 1999 as founder of the Kosovo Fact Project, which actively opposed the NATO intervention in the Balkans on behalf of the Albanian terror group KLA.

Hands Tired From Typing? Try An Alternative Keyboard Layout! [Stephen Abbott's blog]

Is it time for a new keyboard layout for our devices?

There are many ways to type. One is to use the keyboard we've all inherited, the so-called "QWERTY" design, named for  the first six keys on the top row of the keyboard. It was created in the 1870s in order to avoid keystrokes from jamming up on early typewriting equipment. And that's only one story. Of course there are several others.

The fact is, we're still using this old 19th Century system, long after any legitimate mechanical reason to do so, simply out of habit, since we now type on devices undreamed of by our ancestors. That's to say, MOST people are still using it. Some have begun to move on.

Some folks have adapted their keyboards to using alternate keyboard layouts that lessen the keystrokes necessary to punch out words on today's modern machines. One such layout is the Dvorak Keyboard, developed in the 1930s.

The Dvorak keyboard was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak, a professor of education. Unlike the traditional QWERTY keyboard, the Dvorak keyboard is designed so that the middle row of keys includes the most common letters. In addition, common letter combinations are positioned in such a way that they can be typed more quickly.

It's been estimated that in an average eight-hour day, a typist's hands travel 16 miles on a QWERTY keyboard, but only 1 mile on a Dvorak keyboard. (Webopedia)

Most operating systems, including Apple and Microsoft PCs, allow users to change over to this keyboard relatively easily. And on Androids and other devices, one can chose from quite a few new input methods, such as Swype. So are we stuck with QWERTY forever? It would seem not.

The good news is that innovation is not standing still. There are many, many other alternatives that have attempted to either improve on the Dvorak by adapting it or tossing it aside for another layout altogether.

The Colemak keyboard layout

For example, the Colemaak keyboard - designed in 2005 by Shai Coleman (who added an "-ak" to the first part of his name, to emulate Dvorak!) - more resembles the QWERTY layout, with only 17 keys changed from the QWERTY layout. It, too, tries to limit the distance one's fingers must travel while typing.

The QWPR ("quipper") layout, designed by a Harvard student, Jameson Quinn, in 2010, further alters the QWERTY, but with only 11 keys are changed, making it even easier to switch over.

Other recent efforts are the Workman keyboard (2010), and (for the really different) the Maltron ergonomic keyboard. There are also several variations of the Dvorak and even the Colemak keyboard layouts. On the other side, the Minimak keyboard (2012) changes just 4 keys - T, D, K and E. It puts the heavily-used E and T letters on the home row, and as designed to make it incredibly easy to switch over.

And of course, switching over is the hard part. QWERTY is so ingrained in our culture - and even most European-adapted keyboards are adaptations of this 19th Century model - that it's likely that it would be extremely hard to gain wide acceptance of other systems. That said, Dvorak is gaining in popularity, with Colemak the #3 preferred keyboard layout.

Taking a Stab At Keyboard Layout Design

Being a revolutionary myself, I had to attempt to create a new keyboard layout. Because, why not?

It's actually amazingly easy to do, and with a bit of careful consideration and forethought - such as placing keys where the fingers on ONE hand won't be over-strained by having all the popular letters - I desiged what I call the ASDOTH-Abbott Layout (or ASDOTH-NILE, which spells out the entire "home" keyboard, which on the QWERTY is, of course, ASDF-GH-JKL and, oddly, the semicolon.)

The first step was to determine the frequency of letters in the English alphabet, which are (in order):

e t a o i n s r h l d c u   m f p g w y b v k x j q z

Clearly, the first 13 of the 26 deserve primacy on the home row, to avoid stretching the fingers as much as possible. Splitting them up from left and right, while also  trying to keep as many keys in familiar locations to ease the transition, was a good goal. It wasn't difficult to arrive at the following layout:

The ASDOTH-NILE keyboard layout (2016).

Without previously looking at the QWPR keyboard, I'd in fact designed something very similar, with my design being only 11 letters different from the QWERTY (and four keys different from QWPR) yet allowing for 10 of the 13 letters most frequently used in English to be placed on the home row. The R, C and U, round out the first 13, remain in their current QWERTY locations.

The Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (a free download) or SIL Ukelele for the Apple OS, allows literally ANYONE to create their own keyboard layouts and place them onto their laptops and desktops.

By putting this power in the hands of the people - actually, at their fingertips - and with the internet allowing them to put their designs out into the world, as I've done here, QWERTY may be in its final decades of dominance!

By Stephen Abbott, Principal of Abbott Public Relations, a division of Abbott Media Group, which creates written messages which inspire, inform, educate and engage, in mass media, publishing and public relations. On twitter and Facebook.

#StarWars.... in 1701? Yes, sort of. [Stephen Abbott's blog]

Check out this passage from a 1701 magazine that uses rather modern language in places ("hold 'em"?) to criticize a treaty, but THEN goes on to suggest  that their crafty enemies MIGHT JUST COLONIZE OTHER PLANETS, if given the chance!

"They must be permitted to march through your Territories, you must furnish 'em with Provisions; nay, you must permit 'em to plunder too, if they have a mind to it; but the Enemy must not be suffer'd to touch an Ear of Corn, nor so much as to tread upon your Holy Ground,'tis a Breach of the Neutrality a Violation of Promise. The Refusal of the Investiture is a Crime that will never be forgotten, if France and Spain should prosper, which Heaven forbid. For then, this World would be too little to hold 'em — They wou!d be scaling the Moon, and storming all the Seven Planets to find out new Regions, and more Room for their Ambition." From "Historical and Political Monthly Mercury" for August, 1701, p.283.