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MOVIE REVIEW
'Zinn' displays the courage of his convictions
By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff | June 25, 2004
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2004/06/25/zinn_displays_the_courage_of_his_convictions/If Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" leaves you hungry for another movie about someone fighting the government on behalf of truth, justice, and the average American, "Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" might hit the spot. It's a brisk introductory documentary that makes a useful omnibus profile of the antiwar activist, historian, and author of "A People's History of the United States."
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If Zinn weren't such a compelling, compassionate figure, and if his dedication to ideas of governmental honesty and human equality weren't so ineffable, it'd be easier to dismiss Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller's film as a commercial for a peacekeeping professor's lifestyle. (Zinn, who's still a professor at Boston University, has a warm, cozy-looking house.)
But the film, which won the audience documentary award at this year's Provincetown Film Festival, remembers to show Zinn at work, particularly the years he spent in the throes of the Vietnam War. There's footage of him talking to the press about negotiations with the North Vietnamese to free three American airmen held hostage. Zinn, who has a slight, rangy build, and a bright, almost cheerful, demeanor, is unique among peace protesters: During World War II he was a bombardier in the Air Force, participating in air raids in Europe. So his stance against war has an empirical advantage. In 1968, on the streets of Hanoi, he was on the other end of a US bombing campaign.
<snip>
The ideas are generous and inclusive rather than divisive: Zinn wants history to be seen and to be experienced from every possible perspective. And he so passionately wants people to use their conviction to change the world that you might feel bad just sitting there watching a movie about it.
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Free radical
Historian Howard Zinn makes history
BT MATT ASHARE
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/movies/reviews/documents/03931538.asp<snip>
....if Fahrenheit 9/11 unveils the problem, then You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train offers the hope that there indeed are solutions.
<snip>
After a lifetime spent not just chronicling but participating in controversial events that have shaped history, and watching that history repeat itself in often upsetting ways, you might think that Zinn would be at least a little discouraged by what he sees in the world today. But it’s more complicated then that. "I don’t want to sound like a sappy, happy fool whistling in the dark. But I don’t allow my discouragement to become permanent because I’m aware that the American people are always in the position of being deceived by the media and by their leaders, and that they will show the effects of that deception for quite a while. But I also have seen again and again that when people learn what is really going on, despite what the media do or in cases when the facts and the reality of a situation become so obvious that even major media have to report them, a certain common decency, a basic sense of morality, asserts itself.
"My example of that is the Vietnam War, where most Americans went along with the idea that we were doing the right thing. But the truth of what was going on there became gradually apparent to more and more Americans, and they turned against the war. What’s interesting to me is that even as they turned against the war — as they moved from two-thirds of the country supporting the war to two-thirds of the country opposing the war — there was still a hardcore of one-third who believed what the official line is whatever the facts were. If we only look at those people, which is easy to do because they are so well represented in the media, it’s easy to become very discouraged. But if we look at change over time in various historical situations, we see at least the possibility, not the inevitability, that people can change."
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www.sundancechannel.com
HOWARD ZINN: YOU CAN'T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN
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