It's not often that a movie is such a crowd-pleaser that the audience responds with tumultuous applause not once but numerous times. That's the reaction Denzel Washington’s The Great Debaters inspired when I saw it in a crowded theater. Yes, the movie follows some tried and true underdog movie conventions, but rarely is it done so skillfully as to provide small moral triumphs along the way; in this movie, it is not only the final deciding match that gives people something to stand up and cheer.
This film is, in many ways, the “sports movie” I have been waiting to see. Taking place during the Great Depression, It is based on a true story about an all-African American debate team that hopes to win the national debate championship after facing off against other African-American as well as Caucasian debate teams across the country. This movie's heroes fight their personal and ethical struggles with words, not physicality. Melvin Tolson (Denzel Washington), the professor who forms the debate team in the all-African American Wiley College, sets the grounds: “Debate is like blood sport. Blood sport is combat and the weapons are words.”
His standards are unbending and his expectations demanding, and after a night of tryouts he picks four members. The mainline debaters are Henry Lowe (Nate Parker), an astute, intellectual student who is also a bit of a womanizer and a hard-drinker, and Hamilton Burgess (Jermaine Williams). The two alternates are Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett), reportedly the first female college debater in history, and 14-year-old James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), the researcher for the team. The latter, despite being the youngest, carries a certain reputation, being the son of James Farmer Sr. (Forest Whitaker), a preacher who is one of the few African-Americans so far to graduate from Harvard University.
The debate team’s singular struggle to win the championship title would be enough to fuel a worthy, inspirational story, but Washington’s film paints a richer canvas that also depicts the harsh issues of racism in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s. There are some harsh emotional moments that drive the prejudice home. A significant one occurs when the team is driving home one night and sees a black man strung up on a cross after being burned to death by a lynch mob. Tolson, one of America’s most renowned poets (a fact that is only slightly hinted at in the film) also, as it turns out, has a secret life as an organizer for a national sharecropper’s union that includes blacks and whites. This angers the racist local sheriff, Dozier (John Heard), and may set yet another obstacle for the team.
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Article comments
1 - Lynn Gundran
I was quite surprised to walk in to the (packed)theater where seats were all taken, even in front. One lady even had her little baby with her. I am not black, but boy, did I not put my hands together several times during the movie! I have not been to a movie applauded by the audience some four times or more. Great experience!
2 - The Great Debaters Movie Review
I thought this was a really good movie. It was definitely one of the best movies in 2007. The Great Debaters really delivered this significance of the events to the audience, even though part of the story was fabricated.
3 - Dr. H.R. Goetting
Buy book/mag@ US publisher JohnWiley&Sons & pay 4 hardcore torture cockfights entertaining diabolic chairman PeterBoothWiley
Academic Textbooks & Journals Publisher John Wiley & Sons’ Corporate Social Responsibility is Written with Animal Blood: Read an Excerpt from Chairman Peter Booth Wiley’s Oral Pulp History
While You are reading the John Wiley & Sons Konfidential piece, You can disagree with my often hilarious comments in a decent Teutonic accent of authority to the Chief‘s shocking interview answers, but You can‘t put a benign face on the Wiley-phenomenon.
Advanced studies in Behavioral Sciences show that small changes in a man’s sex-life can have XX-large effects on keeping secrets. I have been working for eighteen months at John Wiley & Sons’ archive, which was for me as if visiting a U.S. war-of-aggression zone where sexual degradation, torture and rape flourish. Instead of forcing me to lick the Liberty Bell, my hellish work at Wiley’s archive was interrupted by Chief Peter Booth Wiley’s disgusting demonstrations of affection: his ungentlemanly hands fondled among my pink boxer-shorts as the predator whispered, mouth foaming, a scary “I love you“ into my ears. Sexually violent Peter Booth Wiley had been a religiously inspired ‘sworn homosexual virgin’ who broke his promissory words and began flirting with his homosexual skeleton in the closet.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the oral pulp history of the born-again but very obnoxious Chief Peter Booth Wiley, scrupulously researched by Yours Truly (a latter day Nellie Bly) and with gory narrations of the Chief’s gritty-secret side!
Chief Peter Booth Wiley made mammon the old-fashioned way - he inherited it. Recipes and cookbooks have long been a favorite of the Wiley clan and that is why Chief Peter Booth Wiley dons a bloodied professional chef hat and presents a whole chapter with recipes for barbecued dog meat in his cookbook. A real pig’s breakfast!
Chief Peter Booth Wiley is a blood-sport lover and has picked up that favorite dish of him in the cock-fighting circles of California’s Anderson Valley, where the landed cock-man finds entertainment and where grilled dog flesh is served to fill hungry spectator’s snouts. The son of an arsehole was obsessed with "watching the dogs mate" before they were slaughtered and grilled for human consumption. Did the Bible quoting poster-boy for American fascism use the skinned and blood drained dogs for sacrifices and worshipping before barbequing and roasting the dog meat? It makes me wonder if Chief Peter Booth Wiley, having a hard time restraining his inner-fascist, was dancing wildly in a voodoo ritual around the dead dog carcasses.
"I love to go to cockfights, it’s a bloody show". What Chief Peter Booth Wiley loves compares for other people to child pornography �" it is illegal. "It’s a freaking slaughter". Is the torture of animals - the terrible suffering rooster, bitten, ripped, torn and screaming in pain - sexually stimulating for the Chief? "It has an untamed artistic quality to it". This was not meant as a joke by Chief-Chicken-Shit!
The Chief’s rank underwear is spotted with urine and shit, just like the feathers of a frightened fighting cock. In the illegal subculture of cockfights bets on favorite cocks can be placed and Chief Peter Booth Wiley likes to bet money for animal blood. Imagine all the eyeballs the author will get among the cock-fighting crowds for his literary contribution ‘Cockfighting for Dummies’, an imprint by shady publisher Wiley. The academically-challenged predatory pig, whose currency is blood, can certainly expect to hear some ringing cash registers from the sale of his reference book