The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hi, this is Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with the Slate Spoiler Special podcast on State of Play, the new journalistic political thriller.

With me from our Washington Bureau is Dan Koyce. Hi, Dan.

Hey, how are you?

Can you identify yourself, since I don't even know what you are these days?

Sure. I'm a contributing writer for New York Magazine and Vulture, and I'm a movie reviewer for The Washington Post.

And also as a new DC transplant, you're the perfect companion for this spoiler because

you can talk about some of the DC location stuff and this political thriller. With roughly

the same level of knowledge of DC as the filmmakers. Right, but perhaps even a better sense

of what, you can tell me what your D.C. location choices

would have been.

So as usual, I'm going to lazily throw the plot summary over to you, which with this movie

is particularly burdensome because the plot is really, really convoluted and increasingly

silly as the movie goes on.

It's set in Washington, D.C., and it follows a hard-bitten Washington Globe reporter,

Cal McCaffrey, who's played by Russell Crow, as he follows a increasingly convoluted political

scandal and murderous plot. It leads off with a double murder on the streets of Georgetown as a kid and a pizza delivery

man are murdered by an unknown assassin. Cal is covering the case for the globe, and he's sort of

your traditional hard-bitten reporter who knows everyone and knows everything and has sources

everywhere. And the murder quickly becomes

linked to Cal's college roommate and close friend Stephen Collins, who's played by Ben Affleck. He's a

congressman from Pennsylvania. The kid who was murdered has the phone number of Collins's former

...