Ribbon of Memes

It's been over a century and a quarter since the first moving picture was committed to celluloid - the "ribbon of dreams", as Orson Welles mellifluously intoned.

And so, welcome, one and all, to Ribbon of Memes, a new podcast in which Roger Bell_West and Nick Marsh supply grateful listeners hot takes about films considered masterpieces by critics or filmgoers in general.

The rules: we choose one "masterpiece" from every year from the earliest days of cinema to our dreadful modern dystopia. Do we agree these films are classics? Are we entertained? Did we even understand what the film was trying to say? The questions are endless!*

We start in 1973 (for reasons explained in the first podcast) and progress vaguely chronologically (unless we think of another film that makes an interesting comparison to the one we have just seen, or are otherwise distracted by shiny new things).

Yes, that's right, we decided that what the world really needed was two more uninformed middle-aged white guys telling the world about media largely produced by similar people. Find out whether we were right or not herein!

*Actually, no, that's most of them.

We're also on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

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Stand By Me (1986) 11 December 2021

Nick and Roger discuss Stand By Me.

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Tags: drama

  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 03:08pm on 17 December 2021

    I think I'd prefer to let THE ELFISH GENE lie. I certainly don't want to read it again so as to be able to be fair to it.

    I think that my reaction was the inverse of Nick's to STAND BY ME: it poured scorn on a phase of my life that was great fun. I was a post-graduate student before I encountered RPGs and the book's assumption that all childish things should be put away and we can all laugh at our adolescent foolishness now... It caused me a fair bit of annoyance which my small feature role in the story just made more intense.

    (As a side note, I actually auditioned for FULL METAL JACKET but didn't get beyond the 'stand in front of a video camera and do your best' stage. My agent at the time was very old, rather out of touch and insanely optimistic.)

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 03:13pm on 17 December 2021

    That attitude ("this thing is silly") needs a lot of backup to make it appeal – it overlaps for me too much with "look at the silly man", which feels like the basis of a lot of humour and I can too easily see myself as someone else's silly man.

    I mean, I don't care about toilet-spotting (yes, this is a real thing), but I do care about plenty of things that Normal People would find silly…

  3. Posted by Noble Kale at 02:19pm on 18 December 2021

    Special note for anyone who drops past.

    Don't google 'toilet-spotting' like I did...

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