loud

She was very loud without a word.
She was extremely loud without a movement.
She was extremely loud without overdoing the role.
After seeing numerous movies about women losing their children, this was the first time that I was moved and felt for the mother.
Angelina Jolie was excellent in Changeling.



I am not a huge fan of the director Clint Eastwood probably because the stories he told in previous movies are not the stories that normally attract me. However, I do like the way he tells stories. Like Ang Lee, Eastwood delivers human warmth from the interactions between characters, from the sound track, from the color or tone used, and from a dimension that fancy digital effects cannot bring to the audience. Eastwood and Lee are among the greatest contemporary artists.

Changeling is a true story. True stories are usually more amazing than fictions. When true stories are very dramatic, people believe they are too dramatic to be true. It turns out that nothing is too dramatic to be true. Things do happen, no matter whether they happen under a writer's fingers or under the sun.
Over the years of human history, the society evolves in a direction promoting respects to all human beings. Every time when a milestone was set, it was set with a dramatic incident, often brought or initiated by certain individual(s) who were brave enough to speak out loud and to act outright.

I was doing people watching by a window by the outskirt of the Grand Park in Chicago. It was very cold, but too dry to snow. My eyes were open but my mind was sleeping. Coffee in the early morning did not last its effect after 13 hours. Suddenly a rainbow flag crossed by my window, and my smile woke me up. Protesters against California's Proposition 8 were walking by.
Go for it!
No more discrimination against same-sex couples!
Separate State and Church!
Love is all we need!
I didn't shout but smile widely. I was too tired to do more than giving a thumb up.
And I thought about the keynote speaker Daniel Kahneman's presentation: married people reported less happiness than singles. So if you really dislike homosexuals, let them get married! What do you lose if they can marry each other? The earth is still not flat. The sun is still not revolving around the earth. You still pretend that only heterosexual couples understand the true meaning of togetherness.

As mentioned, I feel the society is improving its attitude toward minority and any other underrepresented populations. Although it's not perfect yet: people (especially straight men) express much more approval about lesbians than about gays, I believe one day homosexuals will earn their respect. Women took thousands of years to be able to have the current not-inferior-to-men status. Lefties took probably similar amount of time to convince the majority that they are as weird as right handers. Homosexuals should not take as long to reach the as-normal-as-heterosexual status. Minorities may keep their unpleasant labels, but soon labels will become joking nicknames which do not represent anything more than a linguistic symbol for a historic fact.

Don't tell women how we should behave.
Don't judge gays or lesbians' love.
Don't allow anyone to justify their biases. So let me say something, just for the record that I try my best not to bias.
White American men can learn how to appreciate non-Americanized Chinese food.
I will not determine the level of my fondness of you if you wear pink.
Queer as Folk is not the homosexual version of Sex and the City. Both are awesome and fabulous in their own ways.