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I'm Stephen McHath, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest. This is an Aztec sacrifice of one-time edition. It's Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013. On today's program, Zero Dark 30, the thriller from director

Catherine Bigelow detailing the hunting down of Osama bin Laden. It has inspired a fresh

round of debates on torture. And then an epically inane magazine article in the actress

Megan Fox prompts us to think about the state of the celebrity profile. And finally,

Pauline Phillips has died. You know her better as

Dear Abby. We'll be discussing her legacy with Emily Yafi, who you know better as Slate's own

Dear Prudence. Joining us remotely today is Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hello, Julia.

Hi, Steve. And of course, Slate's film critic, Dana Stevens.

Hey, Steve. All right. Well, Zero Dark 30 is the new thriller from the writer Mark Ball and director Catherine Bigelow, the team who bought us The Hurt Locker, which of course won the Best Picture Oscar a couple years ago.

The movie stars Jessica Chastain as Maya, a CIA operative responsible for locating Osama bin Laden in his hideout in Pakistan and therefore enabling Navy SE Navy seals to lay siege to his compound and kill him, of course. It's earned an Oscar nod, an Oscar snub, and has inspired a fresh debate about the merits of torture. Before we get into all of that, let's listen to a clip from the movie. You need to get bin Laden. This guy never met bin Laden. You just want me to nail some low-level

mullah crackadol so you can check that box on your resume that says while you were in Pakistan,

you got a real terrorist. But the truth is, you don't understand Pakistan and you don't know

Al-Qaeda. All right, well, Dana, first of all, I'm dying to know what you thought of the movie.

My impression is that the critical response has been largely rapturous. Let's delay a discussion about the morality of torture and the morality of this film's depiction of torture. And just talk about it as a movie initially. What did you think of it? Yeah. Okay. Well, my preamble before we even getting into that is that I'm actually glad that we're talking about this sort of late. I mean, the movie came out a good, what, came out Christmas Day. So it came out almost a month ago.

But I feel like this debate about what it means and how the awards community have treated the movie are all bringing up new points for discussion.

Right. And the latest salvo in the conversation is that Catherine Bigelow finally commented last week in the LA Times, sort of making her own defense of the movie.

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