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Culture Gab Fest. Explain it to me like I'm a Golden Retriever Edition. It's Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 on today's program, the new feature film Margin Call about the financial crisis, the new showtime series, Homeland with Claire Daines and someone else, who else? Mandy Batinkin. Is Mandy in it? Yeah. He's the main advisor.

Oh, I was trying to recognize.

I knew it was an actor that I really, really admired, but I couldn't see Mandy through the gray beard.

Anyway, and we're going to celebrate the late great American film critic Pauline Kale.

Joining me today is Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hello, Julia. Hi, Steve. And our Slate's film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. The new movie Margin Call is Phil McLeff about the fall of Lehman Brothers and the very beginning of the financial crisis in 2008. It's the first feature film by someone named J.C. Chandor. I don't know who that is exactly. But he seems to have made a wonderful film. It's certainly being greeted with rapturous reviews. As per company policy, I haven't read yours. But I'm dying to know what you thought about this movie. Yeah, I don't know about rapturous, but I really liked Margin Call. It feels different than any movie about the crash that's come along so far.

And I'm hoping that heralds may be a new era of films about the 2008 crash doing something besides ringing their hands in outrage.

Not that we shouldn't ring our hands in outrage, and it was very enjoyable doing so with Inside Job with you guys last year.

But this is actually a drama, a smaller scale drama that takes place within a bank that, I mean, arguably makes the bankers, if not sympathetic, at least somewhat recognizable as human characters and not mere villains.

And I like that about it.

Yeah.

I mean, the premise of the movie, Julia, correct me if I'm getting any of its

particulars wrong is it's effectively the kind of insomniac slow panic unfolding the night before

trading will begin on the day that the financial crisis is really going to hit the markets

and effectively affirmed that I think we're supposed to take as Lehman Brothers is unwinding an $8 trillion derivative position in mortgage-backed securities with the full understanding that they're initiating what will be a massive fire sale of a scale that will temporarily halt market capitalism in its tracks.

And what's wonderful about the movie, I think, Dana, is right, is that with the enormity

of that and also the 2020 hindsight rage, we all feel about it.

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