Culture Gabfest - Is Rotten Tomatoes Certified Rotten?
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2023
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Stephen and Dana are joined by guest host Kat Chow, journalist and author of the 2021 memoir Seeing Ghosts. The panel begins by wading through HELL, Chris Fleming’s new hour-long comedy special that’s both puzzling and delightfully goofy. Then, the three consider Astrakan, a deeply dark and unsettling first feature from director David Depesseville, and attempt to parse through the film’s (intentionally?) ambiguous messages. Finally, they conclude by discussing Rotten Tomatoes, the widely used critical review aggregation site and subject of the recent Vulture exposé by Lane Brown, “The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes,” which details a “gaming of the system” by Hollywood PR teams.
In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, the panel dives into the 2023 U.S. Open, specifically the effect of extreme heat on gameplay and how the sport will need to contend with climate change going forward.
Email us at culturefest@slate.com.
Endorsements:
Kat: C Pam Zhang’s brilliant upcoming novel The Land of Milk and Honey.
Dana: One of the best novels she’s read in years, Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas.
Stephen: The Guest by Emma Cline, a novel that serves as a “carefully observed ethnography of the super rich.”
Outro music: “On the Keys of Steel” by Dusty Decks.
Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Kat Hong.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Stephen McCaff in this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest is Rotten Tomatoes Certified Rotten |
| 0:15.7 | Edition, it's Wednesday, September 13th, 2023 on today's show, The Alt Comedian Chris |
| 0:22.3 | Fleming has a full-on stand-up special on peacock if you're familiar with Fleming's work, |
| 0:27.8 | you know how unlikely that might be, he disrupts and inhabits the form we will discuss. |
| 0:34.9 | And then the movie Ostracon is now streaming on Amazon Prime, it's a small contemplative |
| 0:39.8 | film about the nightmare-ish existence of a boy and a quietly dysfunctional foster family. |
| 0:45.5 | And finally, Rotten Tomatoes, you think you couldn't game it, but oh, you'd be really, |
| 0:50.6 | really wrong. |
| 0:52.2 | Fleming us today is Cat Chow, writer and journalist, an author of the memoir Seeing Ghosts. |
| 0:58.8 | Cat, thanks for coming on the show. |
| 1:00.5 | Thanks so much for having me on, excited to be here. |
| 1:03.5 | Yeah, what an honor and what a pleasure, it's so psyched to talk about all three of |
| 1:07.5 | these with you. |
| 1:08.5 | And of course, Dana Stevens is the film critic for Slate.com, hey, Dana, how's it going? |
| 1:13.6 | Hey, hey, pretty good, how are you? |
| 1:15.5 | Yeah, I'm hanging in there, I'm good. |
| 1:17.9 | Shall we make a show? |
| 1:19.9 | Let's make a show. |
| 1:21.0 | That's please do that, Chris Fleming. |
| 1:23.6 | If you don't know, I think you need a visual as much as anything, as much as a backstory. |
| 1:27.9 | He appears to me to be very tall. |
| 1:30.2 | He's thin and bendy, bendy, bendy, and a little sort of toneless both in skin and muscle. |
... |
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