You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music.

I want to tell you my secret now.

I see death.

Silent Freed is people.

No.

I am the father.

Oh.

What's in the box? What's in the box?

You get it! You blew it up! Damn you all the hell!

Hi, this is another Slate spoiler special podcast. I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and this time around, we're going to be talking about Barb and Star, go to Vista Del Mar, a movie that was released a while back. It had sort of a long production history, which maybe we'll get into and was supposed to come out in the summer of 2020, was then put off until 2021, and has now come out on video only, which has turned out to be a real boon for this movie. And I think people are really responding to it, especially for, you know, the oddball and somewhat small scale kind of movie that it is. Joining me to talk about Barb and Star is Rachel Syme, a staff writer for the New Yorker. Hey, Rachel. Hey. So thanks for joining me for this one. I really was excited to talk about this one with you because you wrote something about it, a little review and appreciation of it for the New Yorker that I really loved and that I felt really tapped into some of the things that are special about this movie. I'm going to read a tiny bit of it back to you. Great. Maybe that can inspire our conversation. So this comes early in what you're writing about it.

When you talk about the transition from what I would think of as the setup, the first 20 minutes or so, where we meet Barb and Star in their hometown of soft rock Nebraska and how it then transitions to the town of the title, Vista Del Mar in Florida.

And so you write, there are solid jokes from the get-go, but it's not clear right away

what the movie is up to.

Our wig and Mumelo, longtime denizens of Los Angeles, where they first met as part of the

LA sketch comedy troupe, The Groundlings, taking the piss out of flyover over 40s, then skipping

ahead a bit as talking about that transition you say. But as Barb and Star unfolds,

its quirky heroines feel less and less like stand-ins for a certain kind of T.J. Max shopper. Instead,

the film goes for something far more specific and silly, loving and often lovely. Whereas so

many comedies are either retreads of old ideas or feel designed by committee to hit newsy talking

points, Barb and Star is the rare film that feels sui generous in both conceit and execution. Barb and Star are such finely drawn characters that they could be nobody else but themselves. So that really spoke to me and exactly what I love about this movie. and this is how I was, I guess, going to frame it to you,

is that this movie gets compared a lot to bridesmaids,

which, of course, was written by the co-writers and co-stars of this movie, Annie Moon Malo and Kristen Wig. And another movie that sprung to mind was Spy, which is this wild sort of spoof of James Bond films. That's also a female friendship bonding movie with incredible performances by Melissa McCarthy and Rose Byrne. I love both Bridesmaids and Spy, but I found this movie far more original than either one and in a way more exciting. I mean, I can see why Bridesmaids changed comedy history. It's an important movie. It's still a very funny movie. But this sui generis quality that you point to, I think, is so much more vibrant in this movie, which really could only have come out of the imaginations of these two women who are friends in real life.

...