This Slate Spoiler Special is meant to be played after you see the movie being discussed.

The podcast contains explicit language.

Hi, this is Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, here with the Slate Spoiler Special podcast on Train Rec, the new movie written by and starring Amy Schumer and directed by Judd Apatow.

And joining me in the Slate studio is Anne Helen Peterson. Hi, Ann.

Hi, I'm so happy to be here. Me too. This is so great to have you in the studio. So you are a features writer for BuzzFeed.

Yes.

And we actually met once in person years ago when I was taping a Slate Culture Gab Fest in Austin where you were in school at the time. not laid eyes on you since, but since I've been reading you and talking to you online, I sort of feel like we've developed a friendship over the past few years. So nice to have you

here in the flesh. I also think you're the perfect person to spoil train wreck with because I didn't

realize when I was going to see it that Amy Schumer's character works for a gossip magazine.

And you wrote your thesis on gossip and sort of this history of celebrity gossip. So Snuff magazine, the magazine

she works for, was it seemed like something that you would have some insights on?

I mean, that's a good question. Is it a gossip magazine or is it GQ? I guess I felt like it was

almost supposed to be modeled after, yeah, what tabloid is even like that. It's more like a supermarket tabloid in a way what she works for. And by the way,

the spelling, I love this, is S-apostrophe, N-U-F. So it's snuff, but it's also, that's enough.

Yeah. But there's one point in the, when they talk about, you know, who are we directed at. It's like the incredibly

confident male, like we're teaching him how to like have sex, buy clothes, be awesome.

Right. I guess it's a details or GQ kind of approach. But more tawdry, really tawdry.

Headlines like, you call those tits? Or are you gay or is she just boring?

So there's a pitch meeting at the beginning where, you know, the tone of

this magazine is established and it's fantastic. Also, I don't know about you, but it took me about a

scene and a half to realize that Tilda Swinton plays the editor of the magazine because you never

see Tilda Swinton like that. She's all made up with this awful spray tan. Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's great. I love it. And she's just this very bitchy kind of hard as nails editor. Okay, so I usually before we get into serious plot spoilage, I just sort of get a reaction on the movie. So we didn't see this together. I don't know what you thought of it. Did you like Train Rec? Oh, I loved it. I had high expectations for it because I really think that Amy Schumer's humor is very incisive and feminist and radical in a lot of ways.

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