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Speaker B: Hi, I’m Dana Stevens and this is the slate culture gabfest. One Oscar after another edition. It’s Wednesday, March 18, 2026 and this week we will be discussing first off, Hoppers, the new animated film from Pixar about a nature loving college student who jacks her human consciousness into the body of a beaver avata style in order to rally the local animal population into resisting human destruction. Next we’ll discuss DTF St. Louis, a limited series from HBO Max that’s a combination murder mystery, sex comedy and bittersweet drama about male friendship. It’s a curious sort of show, maybe even more curious than an animatronic beaver movie. And it stars Jason Bateman, Linda Cardellini, David Harbour and others. We’ll discuss. Finally, last Sunday we all watched the Oscar ceremony, capping off what had been my opinion anyway, was an exceptional year at the movies. What did we make of this latest installment of Hollywood’s venerable yet absurd annual celebration of itself? Joining me this week is Isaac Butler, venerable friend of the podcast, frequent contributor to Slate on all things drama and acting and theater related other topics as well, and author of the wonderful 2022 book the Method and the upcoming book the Perfect Moment. Give me the subtitle, Isaac.

Speaker C: The subtitle. It’s permanent now because the book comes out very soon in June. The subtitle was changed many times, so. But now the perfect moment. God, sex, art and the birth of the culture wars.

Speaker A: I mean, I don’t mean to laugh, but did you determine like which of the world’s religions is the true one? It sounds or like.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, definitely, definitely.

Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, it sounds like it has all the answers.

Speaker C: No. Yeah. So we finally have a subtitle which is great. And we have a release date. It comes out at the end of June. You can pre order it today from your favorite bookstore and I beg you to do so because pre orders count more and more year after year.

Speaker B: Yeah, pre orders. The more I read about publishing, the state of publishing right now, you can basically save a book by pre ordering it.

Speaker C: Indeed.

Speaker B: And that also means that you get a present on the day the book comes out. Cause you always forget that you pre ordered it.

Speaker C: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Now I just need to jack into an animal and convince all the wildlife in America to pre order the book as well, to save it from rapacious developers.

Speaker B: All right. And of course, as always, I’m joined by that stalwart pillar of the Slate Culture gabfest.

Speaker A: Ouch.

Speaker B: Stephen Metcalf.

Speaker A: I am that. I am that and so little more, really, honestly. But yeah, lovely to see you. It’s really nice to be physically embodied in a common space.

Speaker B: Yeah, we’re all three in the same space.

Speaker A: We are not jacked in.

Speaker B: Nope. We are not animatronic beavers. We’re just our own fleshly selves.

Speaker A: I am bricks and mortar as I speak.

Speaker B: Pixar’s Hoppers is the most successful original movie from that studio. One that’s not a sequel from an existing Pixar property since Coco in 2017. In fact, I think it’s one of the most successful debuts for any animated movie in the past several years. The movie is directed by Daniel Chong and it’s written by Jesse Andrews, who also co wrote the script for Pixar’s Luca, a movie I really liked a few years back. It tells the sci fi inflected story of a 19 year old college student named Mabel who discovers that a superhighway is about to be built that will destroy a beautiful natural glade where she used to go with her beloved late grandmother. Through a series of wildly improbable events that make sense in the movie’s universe, Mabel learns to transfer her consciousness into that of an artificial beaver robot so that she can go and try to make the case among the local wildlife for saving their habitat. Let’s listen to a moment from a scene early in the movie. Here. Mabel has recently taken on this new beaver avatar. She’s just arrived at the pond where all the animals chased away from their former habitat by human development have relocated and a beaver is giving her the tour. His name is George. She later discovers he’s the benevolent king of the local fauna. Here you’ll hear the voices of Piper Kurta as Mabel and Bobby Moynihan as George.

Speaker C: With all these animals living in one little pond, we needed some rules to make it work. You want to live here, you better learn them too.

Speaker B: But I don’t wanna live here. I just wanna.

Speaker C: Rule number one, don’t be a stranger.

Speaker A: It’s harder to be mad at someone if you know their name.

Speaker C: Looking good, Ron.

Speaker A: Oh, thank you, sir.

Speaker C: You too, Fran.

Speaker A: Tom.

Speaker B: Laquan.

Speaker C: Rosie.

Speaker A: Tamara.

Speaker C: Prudence. Maddy.

Speaker A: Pete. Peter. Petey. Sasha. Cat.

Speaker C: Matt. Tombo.

Speaker A: Hey there, George.

Speaker C: And hello to you, Steve. That’s pond rule number two.

Speaker A: When you gotta eat, eat Pond rule number three.

Speaker C: We’re all in this together. How is that a rule? Well, it who you are, you look out for others who need looking out for their bond rules.

Speaker A: Go.

Speaker B: All right. If only power corrupted most leaders, as little as power is corrupted. George the Beaver.

Speaker C: George the Beaver with secret weapon Bobby Moynihan. You know, when he shows up in something, you’re like, okay, I’m gonna feel. Things will feel pleasant for a while.

Speaker B: There’s some great voice work in this, I will say. All right, Isaac, I’m gonna start with you for the simple reason that you have the youngest child among any of us. She’s maybe a little old for this mo. But did you take her to see it?

Speaker C: I wound up not taking Iris to see it because they had so many plans this weekend. This weekend was so booked that I had to go to the Alamo. Let me tell you. Sold out. 12:45pm Saturday afternoon showing is definitely for a kid’s movie. It’s definitely not awkward to be a middle aged man. Going to see that by yourself.

Speaker A: Do the moms arrange the seating so you’ve got a mom on either side of you?

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. I think I got on a watch list just by doing that. So I saw it by myself. And I’ve had to see a lot of kids movies, you know, over the past decade of. Of. Of being a parent. And actually one of them, the Wild Robot, I was on here to talk about, which I think is a movie that, you know, is very easily in conversation with this one, although this one is much more ridiculous. The Wild Robot is an oddly serious take on the story of. Of getting lost amidst mother nature. I was of two minds. This is gonna be a theme for this week’s episode. I was of two minds about this movie, which is to say the first half of it, I was like, give me a f****** break. I just thought it was the most. The visual textures are amazing. Like the grass. Grass has never looked better than it did in this movie. But I was like, this is just such bargain basement bullshit. Like, the jokes are like sub despicable me. The plot is nonsensical. What are needle drops doing in a Pixar movie? Like, truly, they have actually killed this studio. That’s what I felt for the first first half of it. And then in the second half, it gets so bizarre. Like clearly they just suddenly were able to do whatever they wanted. It’s really. Once Dave Franco’s character shows up as a caterpillar bent on world domination. Like from that moment, those of you who’ve seen it, I don’t want to spoil anything. From the council meeting on, I was in heaven. I was like, this is so bizarre. I can’t believe they let them do all of this crazy s*** that they are doing right now. Each new scene, I was like, this is hilarious and original, and I was just like, having a blast. And so I just wish the whole movie had been that bizarre and dumb and strange and visually inventive and funny and everything. Because the first half of it, I was just like. I mean, I was sort of like, if I didn’t have to see this for gabfest, I would have left as soon as my Caesar salad with grilled chicken came from the little goblins at Alamo deliver the food, I would have been out of there. But if you do go see it, it is worth sticking around for that second half. There’s something going on there that’s so much more interesting, I thought once. It sort of ditches all the having themes instead about birds lifting a great white shark named Diane out of the ocean so they can drop it on someone. You know, like, once we’re at that point, I was like, game on.

Speaker B: Yeah, you think it’s going to be an eco fable, A kind of conventional, moralizing eco fable for the first, I want to say, half hour or something like that. And it definitely does go in some crazy directions after that.

Speaker A: There are little hints that it’s not going to be able to cram itself entirely into an eco fable in the first half of it. One of the big ones is the contradiction inherent in the pond rules, which, you know. Number three is the feel good one, which is we all work together in the animal kingdom. Number two is nature redden, tooth and claw, right? It’s like, guess what? Animals f****** eat each other. They’re carnivores, right? Like, we didn’t invent meat eating and killing other beings in order to nourish ourselves. And they make a kind of pretty. You know, that’s the problem with, you know, allegorizing and anthropomorphizing the animal kingdom, which is a staple of childhood literature that often just gets evaded completely, which is that animals eat other animals. They don’t form a cooperative society at all.

Speaker C: And that was the thing that you had an issue with in the Wild Robot, is you thought like, as much as you liked it, that it was too nice about that very specific thing.

Speaker A: I think you have to account for it. If you take a certain kind of animal kingdom allegory in a certain. In a direction like, I don’t think Orwell has to account for it in the allegory of Animal Farm because he’s so clearly anthropomorphizing. Whereas little children, for movies like this, it’s just been a cash cow, so to speak, for Pixar, this heavy identification with a kind of human like, or, you know, the ability to enter an animal world or an animal consciousness and then an act, have an actual, a human we’ve identified with as actually human, enter a kind of fable world is so critical to the genre, right? But then it just kind of shunts aside this, this implication of it. I would, what I would say is that you get this kind of classic Pixar opening that they’re so good at it. They’re so good at. They do in their sleep. A sort of superficially antisocial young person who has a deep connection to something, you know, powerfully meaningful to them that trumps their ability to interact with others that we immediately recognize as noble. And very often it’s a deep connection to animals followed by one human connection that’s utterly precious and inviolable. In this instance with the grandmother, I don’t think we ever see a parent, right?

Speaker B: You briefly see her mother who’s moving away, but I don’t think you ever know anything about why they move.

Speaker A: And the grandmother is the figure who takes this sort of asocialized, grumpy little kid, our heroine, when she’s small, to the glade and shows her not only the possibilities of contemplative respite in the face of a somewhat angry disposition, but also with a certain kind of patience and listening, the animal kingdom begins to express itself. I thought it was somewhat automated and somewhat beautiful in a Heideggerian way. It was like this odd thing where I was like, this is so trite and yet, you know, I once had a pond and you could walk out and listen to it, you know, I mean, sort of had me and lost me in the same gesture. But it grounds all of the screwball and all the antics because it goes really crazy in this initial contemplative, inhuman connection. So the movie has, I think, two problems that it deals with. There’s nothing if not smart at Pixar. And they’re good at being smart and strategic without coming off as cynical. So the problem number one is it’s not original. It’s basically stealing the premise from Avatar, which they do away with I think, pretty successfully. The very arch and self reflective joke. It’s the moment where the movie is talking to the adults in the room and two scientists because when someone hears about the technology of jacking into animals, the little, the Heroine says, it’s like Avatar. And these two scientists turn basically to the adults in the audience, says, it’s nothing like Avatar. And you actually. You are actually at that moment, you can jack into the moment that all the screenwriters were explaining to their friends the movie they were working on. And all the times they said, it’s nothing like f****** Avatar. It’s actually quite funny and kind of works. And you’re like, okay, it’s like Avatar, and we don’t care, right?

Speaker C: There’s other ways. It’s like Avatar, too, in that there’s the base and then there’s the even more special base. Do you know what I mean? I mean, there’s lots of ways that it’s like Avatar. It’s thankfully shorter and better acted and not as dreadful as Avatar. But there’s a lot of ways that it’s like Avatar.

Speaker A: Yes, exactly. And then the second problem is the red and tooth and claw problem. It’s like, how much are you going to stick with? And there’s a moment that I think Sam Adams and you, Isaac, now have shown restraint in not spoiling, because it is a moment when I watched the movie alone in a theater. So I can say everyone in the theater gasped, yes, that is me alone. But also, according to Sam Adams, everyone in a full theater gasped.

Speaker C: No, that was true at the 1245 avatar. All the parents were like, oh, s***.

Speaker A: And it’s like just the frankest acknowledgement that if you’re going to impute a human consciousness to an animal, an animal has now entered human fallenness, which includes injury and death and total loss of that precious individual. That precious individual is not a concept in the. It is entirely a human construct. Right? By which we then individuate and mourn the loss of an individual as this, like, unfathomably mysterious and unsettling thing. And the movie f****** goes there. And I was. And that, to me, was the moment less the whale, where I was.

Speaker C: No, no, it gets. It builds to me.

Speaker A: But the turning point is that meeting is exactly that moment. And then, like Isaac, I was like, f***, okay, I’m along for the ride. I would have walked out on that movie a half hour in if I had. I didn’t have to watch it for professional reasons. But then it is this kind of hallucinatory, weird thing that kind of, in a desultory way, stuffs itself back into an eco parable. But anyway, that was my. I’m curious, Dana. What did you make of this?

Speaker B: I mean, maybe I had lower expectations than you guys But I really enjoyed it from the beginning. I can’t say it’s the most original. Breathtakingly. It’s certainly not even in Pixar’s top 10 best movies. But it’s also not in that depressing wave we’ve recently had. And I didn’t even see a lot of them, like Elemental and Elio. You know, there’s been this sort of narrative about Pixar that it’s in decline. Right. That it’s not making movies that are as original and unusual anymore, which, on the whole, I would say is true. But I don’t think it really applies to this movie. And I have to say that there was a preview. I don’t know if y’ all saw this, too. There was a preview for Toy Story 5 that played before. And of course, Toy Story should have stopped after the first three, right? It’s a perfect trilogy. It was complete. There did not need to be a fourth one. But then, what do you know, I kind of enjoyed the fourth one. And if I had a kid that was the age of seeing these movies, I’d be really grateful for Pixar movies, even the sort of mediocre ones, because they still, as you say, Steve, are smart. They have a nice spirit. They’re not actually cynical. Right. I mean, they’re not promoting anything that’s bad. They might. Some of the more mediocre ones might be a little too, you know, moralizing or wholesome or something like that. But there are worse things for a kid’s movie to be. And this was energetic and funny. And I agree, Isaac, that it was when it got crazier and more antic and more kind of almost silent comedy, Keystone Cops esque. Toward the end, it was more enjoyable. But, I mean, I would happily send parents with kids to this movie. Right? I mean, that way you have a Saturday afternoon that doesn’t feel utterly enervating and exhausting as it does with so many other animated films.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think the arc of Pixar seems to be that they made movies for kids that adults might go see on their own on a date, which I definitely did at times in my 20s to, like, a pretty good children’s movie studio. Like a good children’s movie studio, you know what I mean? And I think that’s a little depressing given the level that they were routinely operating at lots of bad stuff in their early career, like the Cars movies. Right. But given the level they were operating at before, like, yeah, that’s a little sad. But you are correct that it’s still. I mean, I would rather go see that than most of the other kids movies that. That have opened. Can I just say, the other movie that I think is a clear, obvious influence on it, and a much better film for both kids and adults is the studio Ghibli film Pom Poco, which is like their Barry Lyndon, weirdly, but it’s about raccoon spirits. It’s about tanukis that are trying to save an environmental preserve. The tanukis are the Japanese raccoon spirits with the giant. There’s no other testicles that they bounce on, which they do in the movie. So if that’s a problem for you, don’t show it to your kid. But Pom Poko, I think, is like an absolute work of genius. It is one of my favorite. My favorite animated films, and it is very clearly a movie that this one is in dialogue with. And so if you haven’t seen Pom Poco, it’s also worth streaming. It’s on hbo, Max and.

Speaker B: Or whatever Pompo now. Yeah, Sam Adams mentioned that in his Slate reviews.

Speaker C: And so it’s definitely worth checking out. But no, I agree with you. It’s like there’s. Well, first of all, there seems to be fewer of kids movies out recently, which is interesting, but also they’re usually, like, so dreadful that, like, being able to see one that’s, like, pretty good and has a little, you know, zest to it. I mean, the other preview was some Minions movie. The other preview before my screening was some Minions movie. And I just, like, I just felt a deep pit open in my soul that was then filled with gratitude that my child is too old now to want to see a Minions movie and how grateful I am that we have aged out of this.

Speaker B: All right, well, there’s much else to discuss about Pixar as a company, which I’m sure we will in the future, maybe when Toy Story 5 comes out later this year, but for now, it’s in theaters. It’s called Hoppers. And, yeah, I would say definitely with a kid. Or if you’re just sort of interested in what Pixar is up to these days, I would check it out. Now’s the moment in our show when we talk about business. Our only piece of business this week is to tell you about our bonus episode, which will be available, as always, only to Slate plus subscribers. This week we’re going to talk about an excerpt from a new book by Michael Pollan called A World Appears. The book was excerpted in the Atlantic and it’s as it as Michael Pollan likes to do is a sort of first person autobiographical investigation of a topic having to do with health or science, in this case, consciousness. And the problem of where consciousness emerges from this fascinating idea and looks like a really good book to me. At least. We’ll be discussing that excerpt in our Slate plus segment. The new HBO Max limited series DTF St. Louis comes from the creator Steven Conrad, who a decade ago helmed the oddball espionage thriller series Patriot. Like Patriot, this new show sits somewhere between comedy and drama in tone. DTF centers on two middle aged co workers in the suburbs of the titular city. TV weatherman Clark Forrest, played by Jason Bateman, and his American Sign Language interpreter Floyd Smirnich, played by David Harbour. They’re discontented with their suburban lives and ho hum marriages, so they decide to download the app of the title DTF in order to go in search of sexual adventure. Meanwhile, Floyd’s wife Carol, played by Linda Cardellini, is leading a secret life of her own. By the end of the show’s first episode, their assorted machinations have left someone dead under mysterious circumstances. And a St. Louis county detective played by Richard Jenkins, assisted by a local investigator played by Joy Sunday, team up to investigate the crime. Let’s listen to a clip from the first episode.

Speaker A: Here Clark and Floyd are sitting on a swing set in Clark’s backyard talking about the online hookup app named in the title DTF St. Louis. What’s DTF? Down to f***. Down to f***. So, so you, you meet these people, Mary people. It’s mostly for married people, the reporter was saying, who are very happy and they want to stay in their, in their healthy marriages.

Speaker C: But they’re also down to like f*** people that they’ve never met before in St. Louis.

Speaker A: So you can spice it without, you know, creating commitments or spice what?

Speaker C: Spice your life.

Speaker A: Spice it up.

Speaker B: All right, Steve, I’m starting with you because you’re not a discontented suburban dad. You’re a gleefully happy urban dad.

Speaker A: I’m ndtf. I am not down to f***.

Speaker B: But are you down to watch dtf? Are you dtw? Dtf?

Speaker A: I think I’m vtw. Dtw. Dtf. I was very into it. We had access the three episodes that you civilians had access to, and then we had episode four as a screener, and I watched all four, which, I mean, it was, I was purely being drawn forward by affinity and not professional obligation. I thought it was really interesting. Let me begin by saying that there’s a opening Scene that really just had me from hello. Where David Harbour is kind of in a sort of therapeutic situation with an annoying therapy bot person who’s instructing him to sort of address in a semi formal way, but also a very intimate way, that kind of ritualistic intimacy of a therapy exercise address his stepson.

Speaker C: He’s written a letter from his heart.

Speaker A: A letter from his heart. And the boy is meant to rest his head on David Harbour’s chest, which means circumventing the vast emplacement of David Harbour’s gut, which is a character in and of itself. The giant swag belly of David Harbour as a character in this limited series in order to listen to the heart. And it’s just so beautifully done because it starts with David Harbour being kind of rote and uptight. And you just think this is a classic therapeutic backfire, right? We’re sort of forcing someone and then he has to kind of say a little aside to the kid, I can’t remember about what. By explaining something about. And it just like it. It just. All the. There are microtonalities, nuances and lived lives that have been thoroughly thought out by the writer and. And put into perfectly economical screenwriting. Show, not tell product. And I was like, that’s extraordinary. So what’s accomplished in that first scene? You have a David Harbour problem. The David Harbour problem is we’ve been thinking about him in absentia now for whatever it is. A year since the news broke of his marriage to Lily Allen ending spectacularly. And then her producing, I think, a kind of chef d’ oeuvre record album that was a diaristic and in some ways nakedly true to life account of what it was like to discover that he was. Had broken the rules of their. Somehow he’d found a way to break the rules of what was he’d asked her for an open relationship was excruciating pain, excruciatingly painful to begin with. She’d agreed to it and then he had found ways to travesty even that, according to Lily Allen. And so we have all these associations with David Harbour as potentially a sexual monster. He, like, kept another apartment, it was filled with sex toys he was doing. I mean, on and on and on, you know. So you have all these associations with the guy and the guy’s now in a sex drama of a kind, mystery thriller sex drama in which he plays an extraordinary human being. Like the whole thing, as you discover as it goes, is built around how uniquely wonderful this man is in a world of toxic masculinity he’s like an antidote to that whole world. He’s almost got whatever the equivalent of a kind of overweight middle aged man is to the manic Pixie Dream Girl. He’s almost unreal, but he’s not unreal. I think Harbour’s incredible in this and I’ll just give you a quick visual, which is. And it’s a big moment because it affects his wife in a way that’s quite meaningful, is he signs for a living. He signs. This is how he knows Jason Bateman, who’s a weatherman. He signs for Jason Bateman’s Weather reports. He also signs for a hip hop show that I think is a big thing. It’s like a kind of. I don’t know, it’s like a. Whatever Glastonbury is to Glastonbury, this is to St. Louis. And he signs the hip hop show. And he’s taking. He’s kind of out of shape in middle age, but he’s thrown himself wholeheartedly into a hip hop class so that he can kind of do dance moves while he’s signing the music.

Speaker C: A hip hop class for 10 year olds.

Speaker A: Yes, exactly. That’s the other important one, which is incredibly funny, right? And everything is underplayed and just kind of beautifully done, I think, especially in the aftermath of like, Updike, Bellow, Mailer and Roth, right? And Dix with a thesaurus and the feminist backlash against a certain kind of deep exploration of infidelity and the mind of middle aged suburban men. Thanks to feminist critiques and other kinds of critiques. Like, we just kind of find it icky and we’ve decided that there’s going to be no public discourse around it, right? Like, what’s going on inside married middle aged men. Like, keep that f****** bandor’s box closed, please. And it’s very tricky territory, right? Like, and. And so you have this crazy thing that this show is doing and pulling off. It’s simultaneously an incredibly beautiful and touching bromance between Bateman and Harbour. Those two characters to. Every time I see Jason Bateman on a screen, I’m happy. I just have loved the guy since whatever that throwaway sitcom he was on aired. And I was like, whoever that guy is, he can take me anywhere. And this kind of dual portrait, this diptych of middle aged frustrated men coming together and forming a community, because middle aged friendships are really hard to form between men, in my experience. And it’s a very, very touching account of how tentative it is, how fragile, how vulnerable it is and how deeply meaningful when the unicorn happens and it works. And at the same time that one of the things they’re bonding over is potential infidelity. That is really tricky territory. I will just say I think that that works completely. And I’ll leave you with this. I think I’m more into it as a character drama than a mystery. I’m not sure the mystery as a mystery is going to work, but I’m all in on watching that story unfold.

Speaker C: David Harbour and Steven Conrad developed this. Conrad’s the creator and showrunner, and they developed it together. They’ve worked on him for a long time. And White Lotus was like a kind of clear antecedent that they were talking about. And you can also see traces of Mayor of Easttown in this as well. To take another HBO auteurist show, and who knows how many of those we’ll have left now that Warner Brothers has been sold. But in that, you have a story you want to tell, and in order to tell that story, you have to graft some bullshit murder onto it and then have, like, the murder be the frame. Now, the thing that they have done after doing that that I like is that there’s a kind of Rashomoni thing going on where every episode, what you think you knew about the characters. I’m not even. Not the mystery, actually, but the characters and how they operate, what they want, what they’re actually doing changes because of some new thing, some new point of view you get. You often see one. There’s a couple scenes that you see over and over and over again. And each one, it changes because of what you’ve learned, but again, not because you’ve learned some new clue, but actually because you’ve learned some new thing about the deeper mystery of character. And I had so many mixed feelings about this show that I think I love, but also don’t want to recommend on some level. And let me. I’m just gonna try to work through them for a moment. I think the big problem with the show is that Conrad directs it. And it is visually awful. It looks like it was shot inside of someone’s dirty laundry. It’s like all light browns. It is sometimes excruciatingly slow. The first two episodes could have easily been one. Like, it is just excruciatingly slow at times. It is tonally all over the place in weird ways. Richard Jenkins interrogates people in the lobby of a brutalist building that also has inside of it.

Speaker B: Time out. Time out. Why does Richard Jenkins sit 20ft apart from everyone he’s interviewing.

Speaker A: I know, it’s really weird. And also. And then you. So you’re like, okay, that’s the lobby. I’ll give you the lobby. And then they get into an interrogation cell and you’re like, designed by Marcel Breuer.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Well, then the interrogation cells look like. What police station is this? Yeah, the police station has Blade Runner runes. It looks like where they. Doing the opening interrogation of Leon and Blade Runner. And then they also have the Panopticon array from the MI6 thriller is like, stuck in there. From Slow Horses. From Slow Horses. Or the IMF in the last two Mission Impossibles. So there’s all sorts of. That kind of stuff that I’m like, you should have just let someone else shoot this thing and have a hand in it and have a collaborative voice there. But by the time we got to the second half of episode three, which is the one that the viewers are the most up on, I was like, I just f****** love these guys. I just want to be like, I just want to learn more about this friendship and what was going on there. And this weird. Once Peter Sarsgaard shows up, who gives a beautiful performance. David Harbour, who is, by all reports, even beyond the Lily Allen, like, a very difficult human being to be around. Millie. Bobby Brown said some stuff about that as well, from Stranger Things. He makes you forget all of that in an instant. I don’t know how he. But that’s actually. In a weird way, it’s like, what makes him a genius is that you like him, even despite everything, you know, Jason Bateman has oddly been playing against his type for longer than he established that type, and yet it still feels fresh. Linda Cardellini’s always wonderful to watch. So there’s lots of things that I loved about it, but I just. There’s this meta narrative frame that I’m so exhausted by because it really is the only way you can get these shows made. It feels to me right, like, did you ever feel when you were watching Mare of Easttown that anyone involved cared about the murder mystery in Mayor of Easttown? They cared about this character, and they wanted to show that character doing stuff, you know, like. And I just feel a similar thing here. So it’s very uneven, but. But also to go back for it again, it is uneven in the way the White Lotus is uneven. It is uneven because it is the expression of an individual creator’s consciousness and what they are interested in, what their aesthetic concerns are, what their questions are. And that is the thing that HBO and to some extent, we’ll get into this in the Oscar segment. Warner Brothers in general has banked on in the last few years to great success. Some. Some failure, too, but in general, good success, both financially and creatively. And I’m deeply worried that that’s about to go away in about a year or two. And so, like, to me, it’s just like, oh, my God, there’s like a. You can sense an individual consciousness here. That’s why we read novels. You know, it’s like that. That. That to me was what. Was what. What has kept me going despite moments where I’m just like, will you, you know, pick up the pace? You know, et cetera. What about you, Dana?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think, Isaac, you’re getting at a question that I and my viewing partner kept saying over and over while watching the first three episodes. Is it supposed to feel like this? You know, some of that had to do with pacing, like you were saying, like, is it deliberately slow? Right. And is it supposed to. Is the crime investigation supposed to feel? I think that is by far the worst part of the show. It’s not at all the fault of Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday as those investigators. It’s that, like, the narrative universe it’s taking place in is too distant from an actual investigation, but yet, as you said, needs to sort of observe the forms of an actual investigation. Right. So they’re not in some Kafkaesque universe of, you know, that’s making. Asking questions about the law or criminal justice or anything like that. They’re just like weird detectives who don’t make any sense in the way they’re investigating this particular crime.

Speaker C: I mean, how you do it in a novel would be a multi POV first person novel that’s switched among POVs. How you do it in theater is that like what they do in Moth days, where it’s like monologues to the audience and then a scene or whatever, and you might see it multiple times. And for some reason we’ve just decided the only way to do that on screen is if there’s a murder and then you’re interrogating people.

Speaker B: Oh, I haven’t seen Moth Days yet. I’m actually seeing it next month. So I’m very curious how it does that. But yeah, I don’t. I think somebody different needed to have directed it. But also, I think as much as it’s great to hear the individual voice of Steven Conrad, the creator, which I agree in the writing of dialogue, particularly between the two men, is very strong, Somebody needed To come in with some scissors and some shaping and some ideas about both visual settings, as you were saying. But also just sort of, what’s the narrative logic of this universe? If it’s offbeat and weird and the detectives are strange and they don’t adhere to normal cop show rules, great, all the better, you know, but like, make the audience comfortable with that universe or make them able to operate within it in a less confusing way.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, also within that, to just second that. I actually cannot tell the chronology of events at this point. There is a point in the second episode about when a romantic relationship ends. Okay. And they say everyone confirms that it ended at one point in the second episode. And by the fourth episode you’re like, wait, no, it was ongoing this whole time. What the h*** is even going on? There’s a number of things like that where at this point the detective story is so botched that I’m starting to lose the actual story that wanted to be told. But again, when it clicks in, when it clicks in, I think it’s really extraordinary. It just doesn’t ever click in for the full 60 minutes of an episode. Is that how you feel, Dana?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. The episodes feel longer than 60 minutes, but yet, along with Steve, I wanted to keep going after everyone. And it’s not traditional cliffhangers, exactly, as you say, Isaac, it’s more character driven cliffhangers. For example, Linda Cardellini’s character. I’m only three episodes in, not four. But I honestly don’t understand. Is she sinister? You know, she just operates so oddly.

Speaker A: So one thing I can’t help but pointing out is, is it 1998, 2018? No, I understand. But David Harbour’s like, there’s a way to get anonymous sex on the Internet. You know, wait, there’s an app and you can, you know, there’s this like, okay, like that’s laid on a little fix. The guy, you know, presumably has a dial up modem, you know, and is somewhat aware of the fact that people hook up, you know, in a semi anonymous way via the Internet.

Speaker C: You can hear it a little bit in that scene where it’s like, yeah, they just. They f***. I mean, like that’s what the whole tone of it is. And so there’s a lot that has to be done through subtext and restraint and like letting things leak out.

Speaker B: Steven Conrad seems to be a master at writing banal dialogue, you know, at very banal, repetitive daily dialogue that’s just people sitting in colorless franchise joints kind of having small talk conversations in which there’s an enormous amount of anxiety and desire and subtext going on under the surface. He’s great at that. And the moments when the show does that are great. But somehow that tone, when it transfers into the brutalist police station with Richard Jenkins doesn’t make any sense anymore. And then I’m thinking, like, am I in some sort of abstract parable? Like what happened to the banal suburban guys? I like that part.

Speaker C: So, Dano, are you dtw, DTFSL on hbo?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think I’m there. I mean, there’s only four more episodes that I haven’t seen. Yeah, it’s on hbo. It’s Sunday night. It’s actually in the prestige spot, The Old Sopranos 9pm Sunday night spot for the next few weeks. So I think we would all send people there. All right. Well, the 98th Oscar ceremony took place last Sunday night. We’re nearly at one century of this institution, the Academy Awards. It was hosted by Conan o’. Brien. It. There were a lot of races that going into the awards were not at all pre decided. In fact, I would say that probably only one, Jesse Buckley winning best actress for Hamnet was utterly predetermined by the. The prior results of the awards season. And so I thought that made for pretty interesting watching. But how do you feel about awards shows in general, Isaac, first of all, and how did this particular ceremony fit into that?

Speaker C: Awards shows, I enjoy attending them. I particularly enjoy. I am often the guest of Slate’s Sam Adams the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, which are amazing and beautiful because the winners are announced months in advance and then they coordinate with the winners to get sort of a beloved friend or mentor or something to introduce them for the awards. And it’s a true celebration. The Oscars, I am told. You know, Mark Harris writes about this in his brilliant book Pictures at a Revolution that, you know, the Oscars. The weird thing about the Oscars ceremony if you’re there in the room, is that when people lose, they leave. And so like. Or they stay there and they’re annoyed or whatever. Right. And so like the room sort of gradually becomes filled with more and more seed fillers and gets unhappier and weirder as it goes along. It’s apparently a very strange vibe in there. All televised award shows are too long, you know, and at the same time, you want to see people get recognized and give their speeches and everything like that. And this particular year, while I thought it was actually a pretty good Oscars, they went along at a pretty good clip. There were interesting winners, there were interesting speeches, there were fun moments. There was a tie. When does that ever happen? Especially this is going to sound like a weird thing, but because of the very bizarre sound mix that rendered a lot of it oddly unintelligible and boomy and stuff, I actually sort of felt physically ill by the end of it. Like I had a headache. I felt kind of exhausted by it. I felt like I was like, ugh. I felt like weirdly hungover. I was like, why did I do that to myself? And that hasn’t been my experience in the past. I don’t think it’s any knock on Conan o’ Brien or anything. I just think there was something about the ad breaks and the sound mixing and everything that I just found like a real downer. Did you have that experience?

Speaker A: I had exactly that experience. I was nodding vigorously. And then in terms of winning and losing, I will make one macro comment and then we can break down who won, who lost and whatever. Which is that for me by far. And in a way that was quite specific to this year’s movies, but also I think can be abstracted away from just this year. I think it’s part of a larger trend. To me, the one consequential award, because it was for me the best Picture award was Best International. When you look at the quality of those films, I thought there were three stone cold masterpieces nominated and I would have had a hard time picking between Secret Age and Sentimental Value. And it was just an accident. Three extraordinary films. And that was the one that I was on the edge of my seat for. And not because I had one that I wanted to win, but because I thought that there were superb, thoughtful movies. And this is just me. This is a highly personal response. You take three of the sort of prestige pictures that were nominated, Sinners, One Battle After Another and Marty Supreme. They to me have this kind of overly self conscious, even Sinners, overly self conscious, bloated, huge big statement, capital bs. Feel to them that these non American movies didn’t need to strive for. Right? That there’s this sort of continental gigantism to American filmmaking when it wants to be important now that actually makes kind of for formless and self important movies. And it wouldn’t surprise me if going forward that the international directors just have operating outside of the premises that gave us Donald Trump, whether we hate Trump or the Republican Party or maga, right? Like just someone operating completely outside of the mental ecosystem of America are gonna make far, far more relevant and interesting movies.

Speaker C: Dana, I mean, do you watch the Oscars. As a film critic, do you feel like you have to watch the Oscars? Do you like the Oscars in general? I mean, like, what is your feelings about them in general?

Speaker B: Yeah, I generally watch, I mean, certainly have them on that night, even if I’m not specifically writing about the ceremony, which I wasn’t this year. I’m just talking about it on this show. But I mean, this kind of goes back to what I was saying about the Pixar movie too.

Speaker C: Maybe I just have lower expectations and I’m a knuckle dragging dumbo, but it’s definitely what I think of when I, Dana, I think, what a knuckle drag.

Speaker B: But I mean, I enjoyed a lot.

Speaker A: You even have knuckles.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: No, I, I, I mean, I enjoyed enough moments that I wouldn’t say that I felt enervated and exhausted by the end of the entire thing. And I, I mean, in relation to Sinners at least, I feel like I feel the exact opposite of everything Steve just said about it. It does not feel bloated. It doesn’t feel like it’s part of some typical cynical, you know, trend or tradition in American moviemaking. In fact, the whole thing that was so refreshing about it was that Sinners to me felt like a genuine phenomenon of popular art this year. Right. I mean, it was like a movie that came from an auteur’s individual vision that was not positioned for the Oscars, that was released way early in the year with no kind of, you know, mind to campaigning, and that kind of found its place because of word of mouth, you know, and it stuck around on screens forever.

Speaker C: It kept coming back, you know, I bet it’ll be back on the big screen now, one of the few movies to increase its box office take, you know, during its run, rather than to fall off a cliff immediately.

Speaker B: And so I thought, I mean, it’s not that it was my favorite movie of the year. It’s not that I wanted it to sweep everything, but I was really, really happy to see it get any recognition at all. Because it’s the kind of movie that could easily be a huge popular success and then sink like a stone because it wasn’t precisely positioned to be an Oscar movie.

Speaker C: Yeah, it’s weird. I mean, this is, it’s been a couple years now, and this is nothing. Few things make me feel like maybe I’m becoming like an old cliche. Then the couple of years in a row that I’ve been like, the foreign films is really where all the action is for Me, like, you know, maybe it’s just I’m seeing more foreign films. I don’t know. But it’s been a while, you know, that I’ve said that. And this year, indeed, I found myself saying, you know, it’s been kind of a weak year for English language filmmaking. But the foreign films are really incredible. I do think I. I have a lot of difficulty talking about Sinners because it is a movie I like that I don’t think is great. I think it is like a perfectly fun, politically informed, horror action roadhouse movie with some great performances in it. And so like the. That the swell of popular will sort of pushed it into this place of being. To me, wildly overrated. Makes it hard for me not to, like, get angry at it and then negate when I actually think it’s like a pretty good movie. Like, if I saw it on a plane, I’d enjoy it. And like, similarly, I’m rewatching one battle after another with my wife right now, who had not seen it. And the filmmaking of it, just the propulsive filmmaking of it, is so undeniable. Like, we watched, because we’re parents, we watched the first 75 minutes last night and they went by and I felt like we had been sitting there for 10 minutes. It just is the opposite of the Oscars. It just flew by, right? And it’s so exciting and so fun and so well made that it’s. It also led people, including myself, I think, to kind of like, overrate how smart and incisive a movie it was. And so like, just being able to appreciate these movies for what they are is. It is a weird. I find a weird struggle for myself. And that only becomes harder once the award shows or, you know, once we’re talking about awards and handicapping and should this win or should this not win or whatever. And that’s. That’s the thing that I think the long march of highly publicized awards all over the world, which starts in, like, Berlin and Venice in the spring, you know, the perverting effect it has on the way we talk about movies is to, like, make it harder to actually see the movies and what they are and what they are doing. Because it all becomes about discourse, awards and box office and all that stuff that overwhelms the film, which I think is a big issue, because those are actually the concerns of corporations. Those are not the concerns of human beings. I think the concerns of human beings is cinema as an art form. And I worry sometimes, even as I participate in. We did a Oscars call last Week for Slate plus, we’re talking about the Oscars now. I do worry a bit about how all of that degrades the way we talk about movies sometimes.

Speaker A: Let me interject quickly and say I admired Sinners and in a way I liked all three of those movies. Sinners 1 Battle and Marty Supreme. They all suffer from the same problem in my estimation, which is that the first half of each of those movies I found gripping. I hadn’t noticed this pattern until Isaac, you were kind of talking about it. And then the second half, they bore the weight of very large ideas generated in the first half and couldn’t support that weight. So Sinners, I think is an extraordinary portrait of, you know, two black entrepreneurs trying to go into Jim Crow and obtain the ultimate form of supposedly American self possession and become owners of the means of production. Right. The forces that are arrayed against them. And then it starts to, in my estimation, to lose. Lose itself when it becomes a horror movie. And then it doesn’t. The two for me, didn’t quite work. Do I think Michael B. Jordan deserved the Oscar? Absolutely. Do I think Ryan Coogler is a f****** genius, actually love his movies by and large, and really admired this one. But as someone who really thought Weapons was the best Hollywood movie of the year, God f****** bless Amy Madigan for that Oscar. Cause that’s the kind of performance that won’t get acknowledged as a great performance. And it is absolutely central to the movie that she be unnerving in the maximum degree. And it’s not the kind of movie or performance that I think the academy. It’s not. You always have to ask yourself what form of self congratulation is gonna prevail in the voter’s mind when they cast their ballot. Right. And you would have thought that eliminates her. Why is she even included? I think it stunned even her. But I just thought Weapons was everything a Hollywood moviemaking should be.

Speaker B: It’s interesting that two of the female acting awards, Best Supporting and Best Actress, came from, you know, movies that otherwise didn’t get any recognition or nominations even really. And that both of them to me felt deserved. But I know you have feelings about Hamnet and Jesse Buckley and I want you to revisit them a little bit here because that was a moment that I found very satisfying. Even though in many ways that movie was a huge disappointment.

Speaker C: I mean, I hate that movie. But it also has like a brilliant performance in it by someone who I think may be the great actor of her generation, hands down, who is brilliant in everything. Like I Don’t actually even think it’s her best performance. You know, I would actually say the Lost Daughter probably has her best performance in it. Or if you happen to have an NT Live subscription and you stream the COVID shot lockdown National Theater production of Romeo and Juliet with her and Josh o’, Connor, it is like one of the most staggering Shakespeare performances I’ve ever seen. I mean, I think she is, she is it. She is a genius. And so I’m just happy to see her get an like, if this is the one that’s going to get her the award, great. I was happy to. I mean, I didn’t love Sinners. I was happy to see Michael B. Jordan, who I think is a very good actor, you know, very underestimated in part because he’s so often in schlock, get that award. You know, it was. It was very satisfying. You know, there were very few. There were a couple prizes I was annoyed about, but for the most part I was like, this is great. This is fun. These are good speeches. You know, like, everyone seems to be having a good time again, though. I was just thrown off by how often, like, they, they cut back from commercial at the wrong time. So often that Conan and improv a bit about it eventually, like, the, like, something was going wrong in the booth during that show. And for me anyway, maybe it’s because I’ve done a lot of live theater. So once I realize that, like, my reptile brain starts freaking out, it’s like, oh, no, something’s wrong in the booth.

Speaker B: You’re identified with the producers.

Speaker C: No, exactly. It’s like those poor people, they’re running around backstage, they’re falling on their a****. What’s going on? There’s two producers for Slate podcasts in the booth right now, and one of them is nodding super enthusiastically. So he knows the, this panic when you’re doing a live thing, when you’re watching someone do a live thing and it goes wrong, I find that, like, agonizing. And I just think on some part my limbic system was just freaking out and made it really unenjoyable after a while.

Speaker B: Did you pick up on that too, Steve? I don’t know that I did.

Speaker A: I did. Yeah. One thing I will quickly say about the broadcast is the bridesmaid bit went on forever. It was weird. While cutting off people at the apex moment of their life and career, like, do people really object to hearing somebody who won a sort of slightly obscure technical award whose name we don’t know, who isn’t glamorous and isn’t f****** Anna Wintour. They really object to that person making a heartfelt thank you to everyone they know. And some of those turn out to be the very best speeches because they don’t feel obliged to pretend that they didn’t think they were going to win and therefore prepared nothing and then ululate from the f****** Deus. They actually deliver beautiful, relevant, incisive, intelligent and self possessed speeches.

Speaker C: And I loved when the crowd intimidated the show into letting Alexandra give his speech.

Speaker A: And his speech was the best speech of the whole time.

Speaker C: And that the crowd basically shamed the producers into having the microphone pop back up. And then Conan o’ Brien actually said something into the camera about like, what are you even doing? Like let you know, why are we cutting off these speeches? Yeah, it’s like the whole point is celebrating the art form. So just like let people f****** celebrate the art form.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, I kind of am in favor of Oscars running as long as they need to run because I actually love clip reels. I don’t. The very general ones. Right. Like History of the Western we don’t necessarily need.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: But I love the idea that we get to see at least a clip from every single movie that’s nominated, including you know, the live action shorts or whatever, the ones that most people in the audience will not have seen show a few seconds from it, give a little bit of a sense of the work. All right, well, like the Oscar ceremony, we’ve gone way over time and everybody wants to cut off our speeches now, including our producers.

Speaker C: Sir, I’m playing Dana off.

Speaker B: Why do I get pomp and circumstances of playoff?

Speaker C: I don’t know. It’s the first here. I’ll do, I’ll do. Wait, I’ll do. Taking a Pelham 1, 2, 3.

Speaker B: All right, well, they were the Oscars. They’ll happen again next year and inevitably until the heat death of Hollywood. All right, Isaac, what have you got to endorse for us this week?

Speaker C: Well, I think, you know, Dana, that I like as a, you know, because I swoop in here as an fop to do my endorsements. I like to somehow theme them around one of the things that we have experienced for the week. This is no different. I, I want to draw our attention to one of the earliest. Jason Bateman playing against type as a CE secret CAD and works the. The brilliant 2015 thriller the Gift, co starring and directed by the great Joel Edgerton, who I think is one of the most underrated. Even though he was nominated, you know, he gets Nominated for things and stuff, but no one ever thinks about him. I think a very underrated actor. The Gift there was that period in the aughts or the teens, this is 2015, where like lots of people were making movies at like the 5, 3 to $5 million level. And there were these like small genre films with small casts, great performances, great screenplays, really classical craft. And the Gift is to me the best of all of those. There were a lot of like smaller budget horror movies as well, like the Invitation and stuff like that. But the Gift to me is the best of those. I think it’s an absolutely brilliant, fascinating character study and thriller that is also about loneliness and middle aged male friendship and stars Jason Bateman and stars Jason Bateman. It’s Jason Bateman, Joel Edgerton, Rebecca Hall. Jason Bateman plays this hotshot architect and a kind of odd person he went to high school with. Runs into him one day and they may be becoming friends or he is maybe being stalked and he and his wife have to kind of navigate that. It goes in some really unexpected directions. Jason Bateman uses how charming he is to great effect in it. I just think it’s a beautiful movie and Edgerton also directed it. So I highly recommend streaming it or if it’s on a plane, watch it on a plane. It’s a great plane movie. Give it a shot. So mine’s the gift from 2015, not the Sam Raimi film. The Gift with Keanu Reeves, The Joel Edgerton 2015 movie the Gift with Joel Edgerton, Rebecca hall and Jason Bateman.

Speaker B: Yeah, you’re right. That was a great era for sort of low budget psychological thrillers. Right? Movies that we should have many, many more of.

Speaker C: Yeah, total.

Speaker B: Steve, what have you got this week?

Speaker A: I can’t restrain myself and I have to pour one out for the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who died this week. Deep into his 90s, Habermas is inarguably one of the great philosophers, greatest philosophers of the 20th century. He lived deep, obviously into our century and was productive through much of it. For those inclined not to go and read any Habermas, he’s notoriously not the easiest philosopher to read. As one way of trying to understand his importance, just go to Wikipedia and read the summary of his first book, the one that made his reputation the structural transformation of the public sphere. You don’t read it, believe me, you won’t get far. It’s thorny. But. But just read. The section on his thesis is quite well done because the reason why Habermas is actually Important to us is that he theorized what a public sphere is, where it came from, how it arose out of the emergence of a fully bourgeois and capitalistic society, out of feudal relations. There was now a division between public and private life. The bourgeoisie began to debate publicly about what a society should be, how it should honor the rights and dignities of individuals. They did it in cafes and newspapers and informal and somewhat more formalized institutions. So all the way from cafes to universities became places in which rational, supposedly rational debate would determine what we regard as essentially human about us, why it’s intrinsically dignified, and what kinds of social institutions and social arrangements could best safeguard it and allow it to flourish. And he then theorizes how mass society arose over the course of the 19th and 20th century and was in a conflicted relationship, to put it mildly, with the old public sphere. And so his question was, has the public sphere, in its idealized form and its concrete form from the 18th and 19th century, survived into the 20th century? And if so, to what degree? The reason this is important to all of us is that right now, the people in charge, the tech oligarchs and the Trump adjacent MAGA elite, are attempting to kill and destroy the remnants of the public sphere, right? They are trying to kill off the public as a thing that rationally debates its own fate in a democratic, conversational and open way and determines what its future will be with agency and volition of its own. In its place. They’re trying to make us much more like Hungary or Putin’s Russia. Putin went about destroying the very, very tiny little green shoots of a public sphere for a reason once he assumed power from Yeltsin. And so to the extent that somebody thought through what a public sphere is, why it’s important to have it, and why having it asphyxiated by, you know, the powers that be is a form of not only democratic suicide, but almost like humanistic suicide. Habermas is your guy. He was a. He was a towering figure in German thought. He kept alive the tradition of Kant, the question of whether that tradition continues in the present tense and will survive. Habermas is a very, very open one, but it is at the heart of the political situation we find ourselves in now. So the degree one wants to be fully conscious and self conscious of what the consequences are of losing out. So fill in the blank. Elon Musk and Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos and on and on and on. I think Habermas is a very, very good place to start.

Speaker B: Oh, that was a really Smart, concise summary of something. It seems very hard to communicate on Mike. So do you have a particular book or essay of his to recommend?

Speaker A: Well, his big one is the Theory of Communicative Action, which is just. I mean, I am inclined to love Habermas. I often find myself working very hard to follow what he’s saying. The one that I probably was most blown away by was the structural transformation of the public sphere, because I picked it up. Just really wanting to know, where did this thing called the public come from? The public is a historically contingent thing. They didn’t have the public in Athens. They didn’t have it in, you know, medieval Genoa or whatever. I mean, it really comes out of a certain set of circumstances. Is it dignified and is it worth nurturing? You know, I mean, I think that book’s absolutely brilliant. I find it very, very hard to follow. It is very Germanic philosophy out of the tradition of Kant. And so I wouldn’t call it readable. But it is certainly of his works, the one that I most responded to. The other thing I would say is that he was a public intellectual. Actual. Right. He wrote in German newspapers for an audience. And I will say, because some listeners are going to write in, he got in trouble because he had certain things to say about the situation in Gaza. And as a German who was in Hitler Youth against his will as a young kid, he was very reluctant to apply the term genocide to Gaza. So that’s a controversy. I’m not going to weigh in here. I think Habermas acquitted himself well. Right. Or better than he’s been given credit for. But he was also deep into his 90s and, you know, on and on. But anyway, Dana, what have you got for us? Yeah, what do you got?

Speaker B: All right, so since the movie, we talked about Hoppers. The Pixar movie is one that features beavers as major characters.

Speaker C: I know where this is going. I’m so excited.

Speaker B: Is a slapstick inflected movie. I just thought I would point listeners to. I think I may have mentioned this before on the show, but I don’t think I’ve outright endorsed it. To the greatest beaver based slapstick comedy, Hundreds of beavers from 2022. Is that where you knew I was going?

Speaker C: I knew you were.

Speaker B: As soon as you said beavers, I was like, we’re going to Hundreds of Beavers, so help me.

Speaker C: I can’t even describe this movie.

Speaker B: I was gonna ask for help in explaining Hundreds of Beavers. So it’s the debut film of the writer, director Mike cheslick. It cost $150,000 to make. It’s shot mainly, I think, in rural Wisconsin and is a nearly silent movie. Makes very little use of dialogue, a lot of use of very Looney Tunes style or Chaplin, Keaton, you know, sort of Keystone Cop style physical comedy. And it’s all about. How would you describe the story? It’s all about the story of one man. Gene Kayak is the character’s name, who finds himself battling hundreds of beavers. I don’t want to get into the reasons why he’s battling beavers. It all has to do with his Applejack Brewing Company being. His barrels are being gnawed through by beavers. And one action kind of leads to another. Very Looney Tunes style. Like, if you laid out the plot, it would be impossible to describe.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: I mean, look, are you gonna. How do you describe the plot of, you know, Steamboat Bill Jr. Or whatever? I mean, like, that’s what it is. That’s the tradition here.

Speaker B: Right. It’s a situation that unfurls into all kinds of. Of chaos.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: In the way that one week or Sherlock Jr. Or any of those other Buster Keaton movies do. Right. It’s like each thing just leads to the other and it escalates deliriously. And it’s just incredibly hilarious. I mean, I just sort of don’t know any other way to put it.

Speaker B: And it’s even Keatonian, I would say, more than Chaplain esque in its structure and just how satisfying its structure is. Right. With gags that pay off later in different ways. Like, it is not a sprawling movie at all. It’s just. It’s an absolute kind of machine that gets set into motion and just completes its clockwork. There’s no other movie like it. It’s just so wonderful in this era that we’re talking about where, you know, it’s harder and harder to even make, as you were saying, the Joel Edgerton style, like, $5 million movie that there’s a guy who made a movie for $150,000, and it’s. It’s a wonderful, unforgettable treat. So Hundreds of Beavers. It’s streaming in various places. I think I saw it on Amazon Prime. It is not hard to find at all. And it’s a really delightful evening with beavers, yet totally. Well, that does it for this week’s episode of the Slate Culture Gabfest. You’ll find links to some of the things we talked about on our show page, slate.com culturefest and you can always email us@culturefest slate.com our producer is Benjamin Frisch, our production assistant is Daniel Hirsch, the composer of our theme music is Nicholas Britel. And the executive producer of Slate podcasts is me, Yellow Bell For Isaac Butler and Steve Metcalf, I’m Dana Stevens saying thanks so much for being a listener. We’ll talk to you all again next week.