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I'm Julia Turner, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Daniel Craig in Chaps Edition.

It's Wednesday, August 3, 2011, and on today's program, we're going to talk about the new movie Cowboys and Aliens, and whether it's as fun as either a Western or a sci-fi romp should be.

The AMC show Breaking Bad and whether it's time to jump on that bandwagon and the painter Lucian Freud.

Joining me today is Slate Foreign Editor June Thomas.

Hi, June.

Hello.

And our film critic, Dana Stevens.

Dana.

Julia, hello.

I can't do my best Steve, Dana.

Steve is on vacation, doing whatever it is he does, probably practicing his shoe retrieval skills.

All right, we're off.

Let's talk about Cowboys and Aliens.

Dana, you are a film critic, but you did not review the movie because you canally scheduled your vacation on a week so that you would not have to review it and then had to watch it anyway. What did you think of the movie?

I can't help but hear this throwing of the question to me as an accusation, deserved accusation, and I want to apologize to you both. It was completely my fault that we're talking about cowboys and aliens today and not, I think attack the block would have been a more fun discussion, especially since we have a Brit in the studio today. But I chose it while on vacation. It was actually the movie that I was sorry to not get to review and to miss last week because I was kind of excited about it, just based on the title. And it's a John Favreau movie. He made Iron Man, you know, big summer movie.

I thought it would be a chance to talk about something that even if dumb would be kind of excitingly dumb because of the genre mashup. And how did it manage to be so conventional and dull? I'm still puzzled about why this movie wasn't at least a little bit juicier. It was, it reminded me of the New York Daily News, which is like you read a tabloid to be

outraged and scandalized and amused and have all those sort of guilty feelings. And the daily news

...