Hi, I'm Dana Steven Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with the Slate spoiler special of The Nanny Diaries.

And I'm talking to Slate's culture editor Julia Turner. Hi, Julia.

Hi, Dana.

Who saw Nany Diaries with me the other day? And I also just did a crash read of the book so that we would both be up on the book for this spoiler special. if you're planning on seeing the nanny diaries, that this is the slate feature wherein secrets are

revealed about the plot. So don't listen if you want to be surprised by the nanny diaries. Although,

if you want to be surprised by the nanny diaries, maybe don't go see the nanny diaries. Yeah, I think

like most formula late summer romantic comedies, it's not going to be something that's going to

wildly pull the rug out from under your feet. There might be a couple plot spoilers you might not want to know about. But if you've read the book, you know them anyway. So, okay, I'm going to start off with

a leading question for you, Julie, which is that as we were having lunch after seeing the Nanny Diaries,

you were saying, as an editor, all the shortcomings and frustrations in this movie really fired me up as an

editor. And I wanted to go in and edit the script as if the movie hadn't been made yet and sort of like be a script doctor after the fact.

So I was going to ask you, if this script was plopped down on your editor's table, what changes would you make in it?

I think this would be one of the cases where you ask the writer for more texture.

Somehow everybody in this movie seemed to be a type.

Like they seemed to be shorthand for a type.

So we had uptight,

upper-eiside mom who shops too much and distracted, self-involved, upper-e side dad who cheats on his wife

and cute Muppet Tyke who has no particular personality other than first being percalcitrant

and then being charming. And the heroine at the center of our quest,

Garlatt Johansson, herself, doesn't really have much of a personality

or any sort of particularities.

What I think would make this kind of satire work

...