yeah so I guess you've all heard about this one. Remember the Titans only with debate-teams instead of football. It stars and is directed by Denzel Washington with great performances by Forest Whitaker and a kid who, and I kid you not, is named Denzel Whitaker! No relation to Forest, though he plays his son in the movie.

Anyways, aside from the crazy namesake thing, the film is pretty much what you'd expect from something out of Oprah's Harpo productions. An inspirational true story about overcoming great odds and fighting oppression in the 30's while filtering in dark themes about Jim Crow racism personafied by a phoned in performance by John Heard.

And I admit I did tear up a few times, but what annoyed me most about this movie is the fact that it's not really a story about debating, as its title proclaims. It's much more of a periode piece, a sports movie and a film about nacent civil rights rather than actual debating.

I love debating personally (which some of you may have experienced first hand;)), and I think a great movie could be made out the purity of the great argument, delving deep into the mechanics of formulating one's case, but sadly this doesn't happen in the Great Debaters. More than once it has its characters win debates by using the one thing Socrates teaches us, and 'real' great debaters know, is illegitimate: namely pathos.

When one character is asked to give a source for her claim, she lists the tears on her mother's face (literally!) as a source and the crowd erupts. This is a completely null and void argument and will not be taken seriously in an actual debate. What kinda pissed me off was that the film magically skips this hurdle and has their opponents concede obvious points.

There's a love triangle subplot as well, which does go in somewhat unexpected directions at one point, but only slightly. All in all it's pretty run of the mill but it probably will moist your tearducts at some point. Good performances and decent plot.

Well, I guess I'm off to writing that real debate movie then.

Ha. Why aren't I surprised that this movie attracted your attention? Lol.

After reading your review, I think I'll give it a miss. Thanks for the warning.