On this, the day of the vice presidential debates that I recorded and will watch later, I decided to watch director Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters right after watching "Survivor". Co-produced by Oprah Winfrey and inspired by actual events, The Great Debaters is a very compelling history lesson about a small black college called Wiley and that school's debate team that wins enough of them to be challenged by perhaps the biggest university of the country: Harvard. (Okay, I get that the actual final debate was at USC. Still, Harvard made a more compelling institution here.) Washington plays the teacher, Melvin B. Tolson, who also organizes a sharecroppers' union at night that temporarily gets him in trouble with the law. The students who comprise of his team include Henry Lowe (Nate Parker), Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett), and James Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker) and yes, he was named after Washington! Forest Whitaker plays James Farmer, Sr. and no, he and Denzel are not related. With that cast, there was, no doubt, some expectation of quality and that's what you get throughout the picture. All the conflict and some romance between Parker and Smollett are handled with great dramatic clarity and when Washington and Forest are not on screen Parker, Smollett, and the younger Whitaker have enough presence in filling in. All in all, The Great Dabaters is one of the most inspirational movies I've yet seen. P.S. As a Louisianian, I was pleasantly surprised to read that parts were shot in Shreveport and Mansfield and that there was a "Filmed in Louisiana" logo in the end credits.