A new kind of Gab Fest. This is the daily podcast from Slate.com for Thursday, February 14th, 2008.

I'm Andy Bowers. For more than two years now, the Slate podcast has brought you a weekly discussion of politics that's designed to be, well, a little less formal than your

average chat show. We wanted to recreate the kind of discussion journalists actually have

after work at the bar. Well, since so many of you have told us how much you like the political

gab fest, we decided to try a variation on the theme, a cultural gab fest. From time to time,

we're going to bring together some of the excellent critics who write

for Slate about books, TV and film, music, and many other cultural topics.

Today, our first panel has gathered in what we charitably call our New York studio,

although it's really the closet where we keep the overflow bookpiles.

Here's your host, Stephen Metcalf.

Hello and welcome to Slate Magazine's

first ever cultural gab fest. I'm Stephen Metcalf. I write the dilettant column for Slate,

and I'm joined today by Julia Turner, Slate's culture editor. Hello. And Dana Stevens, Slate's

movie critic. Hi. Hey. So today we're going to talk about, we're going to start off by talking about a couple of movies

that are nominated for Best Picture, Juno, and There Will Be Blood.

And one way of framing the discussion is whether or not these two vastly different movies

really deserve to be talked about together or not.

It's a question sort of of scale and reputation.

Juno seems to be inflating by the second from a kind of twee, lovely indie movie.

And there are some questions about whether or not Paul Thomas Anderson pulls off the

great American epic and there will be blood.

Dana, why don't we start with you just giving us some sense of what the movie Juno is about?

...