be it resolved

My friend Greg Whiteley made a movie called "Resolved" that debuted at the L.A. Film Festival last spring and won the audience award, and finally just had a screening in NYC. The movie is a documentary about high school debate.

I know, you're thinking Spellbound, etc., crazy over-achieving kids with their quirky personalities and nerd-version of cheer-mom parents. The great thing, to me, about this movie was that it is actually much more than that, and as much as the kids themselves are quite likable, it capitalizes very little on their personalities or one-liners. Greg, who has incredible felicity (his last film New York Doll, seems to have stumbled on the perfect subject at just the right moment), found a pair of kids who set out not to win debates, so much as to change debate itself. As students at an inner-city L.A. school where few graduate from high school, they seem the most unlikely candidates to upset the long-honored debate tradition. But revealing the inherent bias toward privilege within the sport (can debate really be called a sport? Extra-curricular activity?) is what they set out to do, frazzling the competition and winning debates all over the place.

A couple things about this as a viewer: this could be a cutesy topic, but is instead made into an interesting race and class issue. But more than that, even, the film subtly comments on the way we use rhetoric and information now in a time where argument and logic seems to have fallen by the wayside in favor of information glut. Also, formally, it is interesting to see how this film is cleverly crafted even though the two narratives presented (the L.A. debaters vs. the prep-school debaters who are the best in the country) don't intersect the way you expect them to. Many filmmakers would've felt like they didn't have a movie, but the way it's put together actually makes use of this discrepancy to further themes of the film. Finally, the viewer actually likes both sets of kids, they are both shown with equal generosity as intelligent, ambitious, and vulnerable in that way that only pubescence makes possible. Lesser films would pit the two against each other.

Go see this film if it is anywhere near you. Here's the website: http://www.debatemovie.com/. It's not just another subculture movie--it's really after much bigger game. And props to Greg for making another awesome film.

p.s. I was a debate nerd in high school as well (though not anywhere near the level these kids are). I won several debates talking about the subject of pigging out on junk food and how to do it properly. I made it all the way to the top at one competition only to get beat by some kid with yo-yo tricks. (This might tell you something about the intellectual quality of these debates.)