The following podcast contains explicit language.

This is Dana Steven, Slate's movie critic, here with a Slate Spoiler Special podcast on the Grand Budapest Hotel, the new Wes Anderson film.

And joining me here in the Slate New York studio is the largest panel yet assembled for a spoiler special podcast.

There's three other people here with me.

I'll introduce them from my left.

Is Chris Wade, audio and video producer at Slate and contributor to the Browbeat Culture blog. And I believe a not lover of the Grand

Budapest Hotel, correct? Yes. Well, I'm a big Wes Anderson fan from way back and did find

this movie often very delightful and often very genius. I have some major, major critiques with it.

So I'm getting increasingly frosty on

Wes Anderson's work. All right. Okay. Well, we brought you in in part because we do want to have a sort of

tag team discussion. I wouldn't say that I'm anti this movie, but it's definitely not one of my

favorite Wes Anderson movies, and we'll get into why later on. Forrest, Wickman is also here with us. He is a writer at Slate and editor and it contributed to the Browbeat blog as well. And Forrest, you are definitely a pro Anderson and a pro Budapest hotel person.

Yeah, rah, rah, rah. All right. And finally we have David Hagland, who is a senior editor at Slate and the editor of the Browbeat blog and other August things that I can't

remember right now. We're happy to have him here as well. You are also a pro. I love this movie. I like

all of Wes Anderson movies, all of his movies, and I think this one might be my favorite.

Wow. You're very favorite among all his films. All right. See, it's not even in my top five for sure. But it is a big, perplexing, ambitious movie for him to make. There's a lot there to talk about. There's a lot there to love. And maybe we should start off by giving a sense of that, you know, all the different influences that went into this movie and what Wes Anderson is sort of trying to pull off with it. First of all, it's influenced heavily by the works of Stefan Zweig, this Austrian writer

from, I guess, between the two wars. When did he die? He died during World War II, correct?

Yeah, he actually committed suicide, having been exiled from his native Austria. He wrote a suicide

note that has been described by his biographer as surprisingly jaunty.

That's so Andersonian.

I know.

And I think he was born in maybe the 1880s, maybe actually a little bit later than that.

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