The Great Debaters
"The Great Debaters" is Oprah-produced, Oprah-approved, and Oprah-endorsed. Oprah, people! If you think I'm going to criticize an Oprah movie, you're crazy. She's all-powerful. She will cut you. It's a perfectly respectable drama, made from the Inspiring Sports Movie template but centered around a college debate team instead of a sports team. All the tropes are there: the plucky underdogs, the unlikely victories, the defeats that come as the result of intra-team squabbling, the triumphant finale, and so on. And you know how Inspiring Sports Movies always have a lot of rousing speeches? "The Great Debaters" is about making speeches! It's not annoying or manipulative that every other scene has someone giving an impassioned discourse on a weighty social issue -- it's what they're supposed to do! Speechifying is inherent in the subject matter. That's very handy.
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