Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 318 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner with the audio player below.

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This week on the Slate Culture Gabfest, the critics come to you live from Julia’s hometown! First up, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s black comedy Birdman has restored Michael Keaton to our screens, in a tour de force of cinematographic artistry. The movie zooms in on the artist-critic relationship, but does it speak to the gabbers? Next, Esquire’s “Sexiest Woman Alive” profile of Penélope Cruz raised eyebrows with its florid prose and clumsy comparison between Cruz’s lunch and the remains of a tauromaquia. Is this genre as dead as a slow-witted matador? Finally, the great Robert Pinsky joins the gabbers to talk poetry: their favorite poems, his bold new massive open online course, and what the literary form means to us today. The show closes out with some questions from the audience. Thank you for joining us in Boston!

Links to some of the things we discussed this week follow:

• Dana’s review of Birdman, on Slate
• The cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki
• Esquire’s profile of Penélope Cruz
• Katy Waldman wonders if “Sexiest Woman Alive” profiles can ever be actually good, on Slate
• Ross McCammon’s 2012 “Sexiest Woman Alive” profile of Mila Kunis
• Robert Pinsky’s MOOC, The Art of Poetry
• The Favorite Poem Project, showing Americans reading aloud
• Robert Pinsky’s libretto, Death and the Powers: A Robot Pageant

Endorsements:

Dana: Marilynne Robinson on Moyers and Company.

Julia: Alex Blumberg’s new podcast, StartUp.

Robert Pinsky: The poetry of Walter de la Mare.

Steve: Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution.

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Andy Bowers and Mike Vuolo.

Our intern is Josephine Livingstone.

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