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"  It&amp;#039;s been a rough year. We were forced to endure jilted astronauts in adult diapers and to contemplate the techniques of waterboarding and wide stances, and we&amp;#039;re all just tired enough to ask for a little positivity this holiday season. But -- remembering that hard truth that every child learns sooner or later -- good will toward men does not come from Santa Claus. It comes, of course, from the benevolent soul of Oprah Winfrey. Her production company, Harpo Films, is behind The Great Debaters, which hits theaters on Christmas Day. For a woman who gives Pontiac Aztecs for those energetic enough to bend at the waist and look under their chairs, it&amp;#039;s not the most extravagant of offerings. But it&amp;#039;s a surprisingly suitable antidote to the inanity of just about every other movie premiering his holiday season (think frightening couplings such as Alien and Predator in Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, or Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson in The Bucket List). And in that respect -- and in the spirit of the season -- it&amp;#039;s the thought that counts.  The Great Debaters tells the story of four students from Wiley College, a black institution in Texas, who strung together a nearly unblemished debate record in the 1930s with the help of their coach, Melvin Tolson (played by Denzel Washington, who also directs for only the second time in his career). The script -- written by Robert Eisele -- is as straightforward as you might imagine. Secondary conflicts of sharecropper unionization and a debate-team love triangle are placed well behind the immediate task of Tolson whipping his students into fighting shape, fostering their talents in the face of stifling racial inequality of the Jim Crow South, and preparing them for a final showdown against some rich Caucasian piss-pots from a certain school in Massachusetts. Is it a little convenient that the debaters always seem to be assigned the morally superior side of every issue (Should schools be integrated? Is civil disobedience an acceptable reaction to social injustice?)? Yes. Is it a little historically dubious that the film&amp;#039;s d\u00E9nouement, a for-all-the-marbles Debate Royale with Harvard, never actually took place? Oh yeah. (In real life, they debated USC, but the rich Caucasian piss-pots of Southern California just weren&amp;#039;t satisfactorily villainous, one assumes.) Granted, it&amp;#039;s a fictionalized story inspired by actual events, but seeing how Oprah&amp;#039;s still trying to get all the ground-in James Frey bits off the bottom of her shoe, you&amp;#039;d think she&amp;#039;d be in more of a &amp;quot;nothing but the truth&amp;quot; kind of mood. Still, despite its easiness and its rah-rah optimism, The Great Debaters satisfies -- especially at the merciful end of a year like this one. Out there, Roger Clemens is a cheating fink. Lynn Spears is the mother of the year. Bill O&amp;#039;Reilly is still a giant douche. But in that darkened theater, some against-all-odds college kids are going to make sweet pseudo-history. And you&amp;#039;ll cheer when the credits roll even though you&amp;#039;re not a cheery kind of guy, because your heart -- like the Grinch&amp;#039;s -- will grow three sizes that day.  And come the first of the year, everyone owes Oprah a thank-you note. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4062/debaters122307/>