The following podcast contains explicit language.

I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest. Stop Touching Your Face edition. It's Wednesday, September 14th, 2011. On today's program, Stephen Soderberg's new movie, Contagion, what would you call this a blockbuster, Dana?

It won the weekend, but in a fall kind of way.

Okay. So an autumn blockbuster. Anderson Cooper's new daytime television show, Anderson, and the U.S. Postal Service, only the latest casualty of digital postmodernity. Joining me today is Slate's movie critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hey, Dana. How you doing? Good. Good to be back. Yeah, it's great to have you back. You were in San Francisco? Yeah, the Bay Area. You had a good time. Absolutely. It was great. Excellent. No details. What is there to say? Hiking trees, beauty, eucalyptus. Avocado? Avocado was involved at times. Trolley cars, avocados.

It was my dose of outdoorsiness for the year.

Julia.

Hi, Steve.

Julia Turner, Slate's deputy editor.

Can we rename this show Steve after Anderson's show, Anderson, and put you in front of a wall of play class?

No.

We could do that. That's great. Let's send a memo. We're memo to Andy Bowers. Okay. Next up on Steve, our first segment. You've completely unhorsed me, as Christopher Hitchens might say. Before Steve Saddles back up, this is sleep producer Jesse Baker with a fair warning here. We are going to spoil on this

next section. So if you want to skip ahead to 12 minutes and four seconds into the podcast, feel free. If not, you can hang out with us for a few more minutes and I'll give you another fair warning when it's time to skip ahead. All right. I'm rehorced now. I'm saddled up. Dana, We all saw the movie Contagion.

I have no idea what you thought about it.

I'm assuming you've reviewed it and posted your review. No, actually, it opened when I was out of town. So our erstwhile intern, now rising Slate Star, Forrest Wickman reviewed it. Oh, no kidding. Oh, wow. Okay. So I've got... I just read his review and it's great. But no, I didn't get a chance to write on it, so I'm really glad that we are going to talk about it on the show.

Excellent. What did you, what did you think of this movie? Set it up a little bit. It stars Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon. Who else is? Lawrence Fishburn, Kate Winslet. Kay Winslet and Lawrence Fishburn. And it tells it it's kind of a CDC procedural in a somewhat self-consciously bloodless way, I thought.

It tells the story of a virus spreading from one species jump point of entry to tens of millions of people to globe over and how that affects the social glue starts.

So it's basically a portrait of the virus, right?

I mean, it's a movie about the virus more than about any of the characters.

And in that way, it's part of a time-honored kind of disaster movie tradition, right?

And, I mean, there's outbreak that, remember the Dustin Hoffman movie outbreak, which also sort of traces a global pandemic, which is a little bit more of a mainstream thriller than this.

I think this movie has slightly artier aspirations than outbreak.

But I don't know. I wavered. There were moments when I thought, well, this is just sort of towering inferno for our times, you know, towering inferno with a super super germ because it is so much about stuffing the cast

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