By Aaron 12/26/2007

The Great Debaters is based on the true story of Wiley College Texas’ 1935 National Championship debate team. Melvin B. Tolson (Denzel Washington, who also directs) picks an unusual team of Henry Lowe (Nate Parker), Samantha Brooke (Jurnee Smollett), James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker, not Forest’s son), and Hamilton Burgess (Jermaine Williams). Tolson whips the team into shape and leads them through an undefeated tear of all the major African American Colleges of the 30’s. The last remaining challenge, and Tolson’s goal, is the white colleges and universities. Will they succeed at the Oklahoma State University? Will that punch their ticket to Cambridge to challenge Harvard? Perhaps I gave the movie away, but come on, most of the papers already told you that much. And Oprah produced the movie, so you can better believe you’re going to get a happy ending.

The movie was good enough – I should also say that I think that a lot of “true story” movies are pretty cliché. I mean, you take the average Hollywood script and change NOTHING because most stories that aren’t positive and uplifting never make it to the big screen. This movie was no different, but it was at least good at those things. It has two strong mentor characters in Forest Whitaker (underused) and Denzel Washington. The exciting young guns are great too as Parker, Smollett, and young Whitaker turn in great performances. I really hope that Parker and Whitaker especially keep making movies, because they have real potential, ironically filling roles their respective mentors (Washington and Forest) play now – they have that look and that charisma. Hell, Parker even has some of the emotion and sentimentality to pull off some of the roles hard-ass Denzel never could. You mix in your sympathetic geek, tall-handsome genius, smart-babe, some romance, some love-triangles and you have a nucleus for your movie. This movie does a good job with that nucleus, takes the time to develop most of the characters and their relationships, and is actually better when it sticks to formula then when it strays (like trying a subplot with the farmers’ union).

Now most of my faults with the movie have little to do with substance – the acting was good, the story was good, the thematic elements were strong, all that good stuff. But the movie was an Oprah flick, which is almost as bad as being a Disney flick. Meaning, certain things have to happen, and you know what those are. The predictability of it all was discussed above, so I won’t keep whining about that. Some important scenes also just did not make sense if you really stopped and thought about them. A key scene involving the farming sub-plot was particularly frustrating in that it was also seemingly useless.

For the most part I liked the debate scenes. I need to preface my comments by saying that I am currently a collegiate debater, so I take debate movies with a grain of salt and chalk most of them up to not truly knowing about debate but it usually doesn’t matter because they don’t pretend they know a lot. Now a movie that does…well…I’m a little harder on those movies. This movie clearly simplified the activity of debate, which worked for the most part. It was also good that the movie showed a lot of debate. It made the movie a little bit more exciting and let the actors really flex their muscles in action, which helped their characters outside of the debates too. I did have one bone to pick with this annoying “Denzel writes the arguments” B.S. I mean, not only was that pretty stupid, but it just did not even make sense, and it was kept alive as a recurring theme. Just think about it this way – if you’re in a debate where you know the topic beforehand and you’re only going to make four to five arguments, do you think, just possibly, that you would be fine thinking of argument without going to pieces? Especially considering all of the characters were geniuses who probably had IQ’s damn near off the scale. Oh well, that’s Hollywood for you.

Most of that was probably incessant rambling. I guess I can’t exactly figure out if I’m just bitter because the movie didn’t paint the crystal clear image of debate that I wanted, but the movie was good enough to earn a 7/10 saltystix.

Could “Avatar” Win Best Picture?

By Brett Hogan

 

Last week, the trailer for James Cameron’s sci-fi experiment “Avatar” debuted. While initially unimpressed with the teaser, I began to wonder: Could this film win best picture? 

 

Buzz has been generating for this movie for years. Years. The technology to make this movie didn’t exist when Cameron conceived it, so he invented it. When is the last time you heard of a director spearheading the invention of anything? The casting started in 2005. Most movies these days, even epics, are done in half that time. I could go on. 

 

The most important thing to take away from all of this is that people are saying this will be the future of movies. Now, I don’t agree with the idea that CGI will become more prevalent than it already is. But I do believe that this will set the bar miles higher for sci-fi. I mean, that is what Titanic did. And that won some awards if memory serves.

 

I’ll bet you’re asking yourself, how can you even suggest that a film like this will win Best Picture when the initial trailer was nothing better than visual stimulation? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, the Academy has expanded Best Picture to ten films. This doesn’t guarantee anything other than improved chances for most films on the cusp.

 

Second, after last year’s Oscars debacle, which saw the best film of the year, “The Dark Knight,” not only get shafted in awards but nominations as well, the Academy is pulling out all the stops to appease those with the loudest voices in the film industry, the fanboys. Now, the Academy probably didn’t lose anything because of that other than some viewers of the award show. Perhaps if people are again outraged with the winners or nominees, the heads of the Academy would lose their jobs. So this is all about the Academy protecting itself, which is not so outrageous.  

 

 

Third, there is an economic motive here. I’ve heard this film will cost $190 million, not counting the R&D costs associated with Cameron’s inventions or the cost of getting 3-D cameras into every theater in the country. The Academy will do everything in its power to get people into the seats and make this the next “Titanic” or “The Dark Knight.” But the Academy doesn’t have much power, besides nominating and awarding, so they will slap the “Nominated for Best Picture” moniker onto every commercial and print ad to get the people who didn’t believe the critics to relent and see this movie.

 

Of course, all of this is pure conjecture, and no revolutionary film (Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, etc.) has ever won the Best Picture category because it changed the game. Except maybe Titanic. But still, could this movie actually win? My answer is no but a nomination is certain and who knows what could happen from there. We’ll know more come February 2010.