Nov 6 2007'The Great Debaters' Trailer is Non-Debatably Melodramatic

Having exhausted the options for high school sports, and probably shortly after Dead Poet's Society finally hit the top of his Netflix queue, Denzel Washington has devised a new, less exciting way to tell the story of an underdog African-American team in a racist time period: instead of football or whatever, how about a debate team?

The flaw in this, of course, is that a movie about a debate team is inherently pretty nerdy and uninteresting. Ask someone if they want to watch a feel-good movie about a debate team and, unless they were captain of their debate team, watch their eyes glaze over. (It might be difficult to tell, because their head will be shaking a violent negative.)

I appreciate that Denzel Washington is trying to document all of African-American history through excessive melodrama, but debate teams? After The Great Debaters, can we expected The Great Chess Players? The Great Hall Monitors? The Great Kids Who Had to Wheel Around the Overhead Projectors?

Or maybe the whole thing is just an excuse to finally cast a movie with Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, and what I assume is a young, lab-created hybrid of the two, appropriately named Denzel Whitaker. Seriously.

The Great Debaters Trailer [Yahoo!]