Just watched it.
I was curious because I hang around in GD a bit. I wondered if a movie about debating would be interesting. It was fabulous. Anyone else?
I thought it was a great movie, but then again, I’m biased. 
I thought it was excellent. Going into it I wasn’t expecting much in the way of an interesting story and boy was I wrong. The subplot especially, concerning the pressure on Professor Denzel’s character, was especially interesting.
I still think they should have called it The Master Debaters.
I liked it. Jurnee Smollett is HOT and has grown into quite the package since I last saw her in Eve’s Bayou.
Denzel Washington is the new Ron Howard: reassuring cliches competently filmed. Big-budget Hallmark/Lifetime movies. Yawn.
I felt weird watching her having sex, though. Kinda like watching your little sister getting it on.
Yeah, I got the little sister vibe during that scene too, but her unbelievable hotness helped me to block it out. Eve’s what? .
It was a little heavy on the Oprah/Lifetime “inspirational” aspect, but it’s a very interesting story and I enjoyed the special feature interviews with some of the real Wiley College debaters.
Did they really debate the merits of civil disobedience with Harvard? If so it was quite a remarkable preview of the civil rights movement.
The Great Debaters is…great is…debatable.
I’m all for making movies of stories that are typically relegated to the margins of history. But this movie loads the deck in every conceivable way, as if they don’t trust the integrity of the material. Anytime I find myself bored with the new Denzel the Villain, I just have to remind myself it’s still preferable at this point than Denzel the Savior, something he virtually had trademarked pre-Training Day. All the conflicts and oppositions are predictable and two-dimensional. All the characters are reasonably well-acted, but still relegated to types. And there are some fine moments, but any movie that’s made to be “inspirational” and “uplifting” usually wears that agenda on its sleeve at all times, which ends up making it less drama and more History Channel fodder.
They didn’t debate Harvard at all (which was integrated at the time, btw). They debated USC.
And given that the movie always has the “Good Guys” conveniently debating the “Good Position”, I doubt that happened in real life either. What would have been gutsy is forcing the team to take the unpopular side of an issue and having them flex their debating skills against something with which they personally believed. This happens in Debate competitions all the time. But the movie, like in just about everything else, plays it safe and sympathetic. This film coddles viewers instead of challenging them, and unless there’s something else exceptional going on in the filmmaking itself, I usually have little patience for this kind of treatise.
While I haven’t seen The Great Debaters(yet, it is working its way up my queue), I actually did just watch another [del]great[/del] excellent debate-based movie, Rocket Science. Take a little bit of Rushmore, and(I suppose) a bit or The Great Debaters, mix in a toned-downed Napoleon Dynamite-esque cast of characters, and top it off with a solid indie soundtrack to boot. If nothing else, you’ll be humming the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” for a solid few days afterwards, if not ‘speaking’ it.