ykf 483620:

Howard Zinn is one of the greatest historians/writers of our time. His mind is brilliant and so is this documentary. It gives a great primer course of Zinn's personal background and a taste of his politcial tone and speech. I liked learning more about a man whom I greatly admire and it was very inspiring to his words about the state of the world today. I thought the documentary did a good job of balancing Zinn's personal and his business/political life. We get a glimpse of the man behind all of these great words. I really liked this documentary and I would recommend it to political activists and historians alike. We can't know where we're going unless we know where we've been.

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.

Ryan Redfield:

This documentary did not do justice to the career and the ideas of Howard Zinn. If you want to fully understand him, listen to his lectures on cd, and read his books, especially A People's History. You can skip this movie.

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?