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Sit through Factor: 65%

Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral

  2004   3.7 stars 78 mins Documentary Rated: NR

Activity

• DVD Shipped to 533 people
• Instantly Watched by 534 people
• DVD Queued by 358 people See Most Queued on DVD
• Queued on Instant Watch by 859 people See Most Queued on Streaming

Synopsis

Matt Damon narrates this biographical portrait of historian and activist Howard Zinn, author of the pivotal A People's History of the United States, who's been at the forefront of progressive thought in America for decades. The documentary chronicles his commitment to social change through archival materials, commentary from Zinn and interviews with contemporaries Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Tom Hayden and Alice Walker, among others.

Directed By

Deb Ellis

Formats Available

• DVD
• Instant Watch : until 21-Apr-2011

All Genres

Biographical Documentaries, Documentary, Political Documentaries, and Social & Cultural Documentaries

Most Helpful Reviews

VJ Purplequeen:

Loved learning more about Zinn, his background and his life. This is not a movie for enjoyment, but more of a biography of one of the most brilliant and compassionate minds of our times.

Dean2006@Hollywood:

"Groupthink" has metastasized and is now growing out of control. Hollywood?s production of self-indulgence, paranoia-chic, a toxic combination of political naïveté and tendentiousness has visited us with Fahrenheit 9/11, The Corporation, Orwell Rolls in His Grave and now "Howard Zinn: You Can?t Be Neutral on a Moving Train." ~~The danger in these enterprises is that the critical faculty is suspended. At one point in the film Zinn is quoted as saying that the phrase "collateral damage" is "the language of terrorism." Of course it is precisely not the language of terrorism. To the terrorist, who targets civilians deliberately, no damage is collateral. Every shattered body is an achievement, the very thing he was aiming at in the first place, not an accidental by-product of some other purpose. "Collateral damage" is the language of the counter-terrorist, the soldier who wants to confine his killing only to the terrorist enemy, not just anyone who happens by at the wrong moment, but is not always able to do so. By all means, let the professor criticize such language for its bureaucratic callousness. Let him even make the case that collateral damage is too high a price to pay for combating the terrorist enemy militarily. But someone needs to tell him that he is talking through the back of his neck if he fails to make even so elementary a distinction as this between the methods and aims of the two sides.~~It is a good example of the way things work in Hollywood, which has never demanded much in the way of a critical sense from its creative talent and blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction. Why would Ellis and Mueller correct the when they treat every other word out of his mouth as if it were holy writ?
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