Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with a spoiler special podcast on Tropic Thunder.

Joining me is Tanner Colby. Hi, Tanner. Hi, Dana.

Comedy writer and the recent author of The Chris Farley Show, a biography of Chris Farley, oral biography.

So, we saw Traffic Thunder last night. Very funny movie.

Hysterical. Foniest movie of the summer, I would say without a doubt.

I absolutely agree.

I think this is the most successful comedy this summer.

Granted in a summer that's been fairly weak on the comedy front,

but even better than when we talked about last week, Pineapple Express.

Would you agree?

Yes.

Tider, I mean, much more tightly.

Tider, more high energy, more successfully realized in all of its fronts. And I mean, there are few points where you feel like, okay, I'm watching a Formula Studio comedy every now and then,

but then by the end, you're just, you're having such a good time that you don't care.

Well, it's not the most, I mean, I wouldn't say it's the most innovative of comedies I've ever seen.

It's fairly standard in some ways Hollywood satire, but just a very well done one. We should mention also, I don't think I have yet, that the movie

is directed by, produced by, co-written by, and starring Ben Stiller. So it's very much a Ben Stiller

production. Okay, let's start off. This is something that we can spoil that will also

launch us into a discussion of the movie really easily, which is the four fake trailers that you get up front as a movie is about to screen

with no warning that they're fake, of course.

No, none whatsoever.

And the first one is a parody of, which I don't think I've ever seen done before.

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