The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with a Slate spoiler special, the first of 2011, on the new Ivan Reitman movie No Strings Attached.

Joining me in the Slate studio today is Lindsay Robertson.

Hi, Lindsay.

Hi, Dana.

Lindsay, you are a freelance writer, a frequent spoiler companion, and you're just starting a new, you're launching a new blog, a television blog for Yahoo next month?

Yes.

Will you come back in and tell us about it when it gets started?

Of course, yes.

Great.

In the meantime, I'm really glad you could come in and see this movie with me.

In fact, it made this movie so much funner that you saw it with me that you just brightened my week because otherwise it would have been a real drag. So I guess it's pretty obvious.

I didn't love no strings attached. You want to give me a quick reaction? It gave me two hours to

contemplate my mortality, which I want movies to distract me from that. Kind of a memento-mory,

like a skull on your desk kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, I did. And it was almost two hours, too,

for a romantic comedy that's really a long time. It's definitely a movie that you sense the duration

ticking away as you're watching it. Yeah. Which shouldn't be happening in any kind of comedy or

romantic comedy. I think it actually might be longer than true grit, which just doesn't seem right.

So, and not very much happens in those two hours.

So let's go over the story of this movie.

Also, you wanted to talk a little bit about the production history of the movie, right?

It was sitting on a shelf, I think, for a while and has been re-released because it stars Natalie Portman and she's so big now with her Oscar push for Black Swan.

...