Hi, this is Dana Steven, Slate's movie critic, here with the Slate's spoiler special podcast on Birdman, the new film from Alejandro Gonzalez-Iñaritu.

Discussing it with me here in the Slate studio in New York are Slate eminences, Forrest Wickman, and David Hagland. Hello.

Hello.

You guys are both, I don't even know what to call you. Your writers and contributors to the Slate, Browbeat Culture Blog? I would just say editors and writers on the culture side of Slate.

Okay.

It's the simplest description.

Also, I thought we were going to do this all in one take.

You just retook something, Dana.

I think we have to leave it in and just go all out.

My integrity is an artist is shot.

All right. So Birdman is a movie that I feel like I've talked about every day since I saw it a week and a half ago or so. We did it as a topic on the Culture Gab Fest. Everyone I run into seems to have seen it and have some kind of opinion about it. And I brought you in today for us because I think you liked it more than David and I do. But whether or not I think it's a completely successful movie, I do love talking about this movie. So let's get into it.

Birdman, where do we start out talking about it?

It is a film by Inari, too, the guy who made Babel, 21 grams, Amoris Peros, the Mexican filmmaker.

Beautiful is the only other movie he made, I think.

The first three were all with the same writer.

And then, since then, he's just

done beautiful with Javier Bardem and then this. Which he wrote himself, Beautiful? I think he

co-wrote both that and this movie. Because I have to say my prior experience with Inari, too,

has not been that positive, especially when he writes his own movies. I thought Beautiful was really

terrible. And I've actually amazed that he's pulled himself enough out of the depths.

Like, that movie was just the definition of, you know,

when you hear about miserableness, right?

...