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The following podcast contains explicit language.

I'm Julia Turner, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest all aboard the Model Train edition.

It's Wednesday, March 12th, and on today's program, we're going to talk about West Anderson's new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the new Neil deGrasse Tyson miniseries Cosmos on Fox. And Felix Salmon will be joining us to discuss Bitcoin and possibly the man who created it and various articles thereabout. Joining me today is Slate's film critic, Dana Stevens. Hi, Dana. Hey, Julia. And Steve is out this week, so David Hagland, Slate's browbeat editor, sitting in. Hi, Julia. How are you? Good. Okay, well, let's start with Grand Poudapest Hotel. Dana. Dana, you are our film critic. Tell us what you thought. All right. Well, you just stepped out of the movie, so I really can't wait to hear what you thought. Grand Budapest Hotel is a Wes Anderson film, and it seems that it's impossible to discuss any Wes Anderson film without immediately making it a referendum on all of Wes Anderson. So I'll preface my opinion of Grand Budapest Hotel by saying that in general, I would say I'm tremendously drawn toward Wes Anderson's aesthetic, and I find him fascinating, and I'm always excited to see what he does next, but I have been disappointed by almost every one of his films. There are only two Wes Anderson movies that I love unreservedly, Rushmore and Fantastic Mr. Fox, which we can talk about later. And this is not among them. In fact, this would not make my top five Wes Anderson films. I think Grand Budposte Tell is sort of an overconceived, overly decorated,

overly fussy, beautiful object that gives you many moments of joy while watching it, but that

ultimately has something missing, something really important missing, that seems to be missing

from a lot of West Anderson movies, and we can get to what that is. But it has to do with the way he depicts suffering, emotion,

things that lie outside of the perfectly controlled universes that he creates. And given that the

Grand Budapest Hotel is also sort of his first historically situated movie, even though it's

situated in a kind of pseudo-history,

it is essentially a war movie, a movie about the beginning of a war that closely resembles the

Second World War. So there's a lot of suffering on the edges of the movie that doesn't quite

make it in. And that's what somehow bothers me about it in an obscure way that I'm not

expressing very well. I think that's super interesting. and I think we should argue about whether this movie keeps that

suffering at bay or actually incorporates it in a really interesting way.

But let's start maybe by just giving some contours of the plot.

David, do you want to walk us through?

Sure. There's a somewhat complicated nesting structure.

...