Resolved (HBO) - Both

Jennie and I often find the doldrums of summer are a catalyst to some of the worst television has to offer. Simply look at the lineup of the networks: Celebrity Circus, So You Think You Can Dance, and America’s Got Talent. This forces us to the barren wasteland of our digital cable as we search for something to watch.

Why don’t we do something active? Read books? Play strip poker? Something? Who knows, get off my back.

This particular night we stumbled upon a documentary that has been making the festival circuits. Now, I would be hard pressed to say that a documentary about policy debate garners any of my interest, but for some odd reason I stayed on the channel and Jennie and I were treated to a fantastic little film. You may have previously read my thesis on documentaries as of late, so I won’t go into the manipulation I’m sure occurred in the presentation, but I truly felt for these “characters”.

The documentary focuses on two sets of debaters, one from a highly prestigious Texas school and another from an inner city California school. The film at first focuses on how debate has mutated to its current state that is a speed read (sp-read) contest to see who can up the body count till one team proves the other team’s solution will cost more to humanity. The two teams the movie focuses on use vastly different strategies from this, now common, strategy and are successful in varying degrees.

Greg Whiteley, the director, uses cartoons and celebrities to push along the agendas and describe the action as it unfolds. This method is used by many of the new documentaries and I find it to be a perfect way to keep one's interest in a particularly dull subject. The team from the inner city eventually stands out as the true heroes of this film as they mount an attack on policy debate itself. They believe that just winning trough shear volume of arguments read isn’t true debate. Their noble attack leads to the climax of the film which finds them confusing debate teams across California as they deconstruct the very act of debate. We cheered as the bewildered opponents shuffled their stacks of paper and grumbled that they couldn’t understand what was going on. But, as the Clash have taught us, if you fight the law, the law will win. And in light of this inevitability the team eventually falls, but it works for the film.

6 out of 10: Whiteley turns policy debate into movie magic!