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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Terminator 2 (1991) 26 February 2022

Nick and Roger discuss The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

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  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 04:55pm on 06 March 2022

    I am more than willing to defend TRUE LIES.

    And my beard and beards in general.

  2. Posted by Nick Marsh at 06:27pm on 06 March 2022

    I’ll have no truck with general’s beards, but I agree True Lies is pretty good. Probably not a masterpiece, but most films aren’t.

  3. Posted by RogerBW at 06:46pm on 06 March 2022

    I think I'd argue that from most directors True Lies would be pretty impressive, but from the director of The Terminator and Aliens and The Abyss and Terminator 2 it is a bit meh. It fits a lot better into Arnie's filmography up to that point than it does into Cameron's, who'd directed only those four, Piranha II: The Spawning, and Xenogenesis, a short film in 1978.

  4. Posted by Robert at 01:39am on 11 March 2022

    One of my early memories of The Terminator from the local video stores was that it was explicitly listed as and displayed with horror movies. Even after there were some nascent SciFi/Fantasy areas it stayed in horror for some time.

    There seems to be something that I find very successful in the film as an adult. Something adjacent to Lovecraft or the Thing. Like the Terminator is a good horror story with SciFi wainscoting.

    Also it being in horror is why I didn’t watch it until I was in undergrad. I think I was the last person I knew to watch it.

  5. Posted by Nick Marsh at 09:37am on 13 March 2022

    My childhood video store did not get this memo! It’s one of the first VHS films I saw.

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