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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The Hurt Locker (2008) 12 November 2022

Roger and Nick discuss The Hurt Locker (2008).

Download

MaryAnn's guest spot on the Spy Hards podcast is here.

Tags: war

  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 04:43pm on 12 November 2022

    The last Narnia movie was THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER.

    The word that was confusing Nick is 'epistolatory' a term for a novel in the form of a series of letters: examples include DRACULA. I'd very much like to see a film that was trying to use the epistolatory form but it's not a natural fit for the medium.

    J.M.CULE (English graduate for hire: will pontificate for food)

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 05:43pm on 12 November 2022

    Interesting, I've heard that as "epistolary". These sad fallen days…

  3. Posted by Nick at 03:23am on 13 November 2022

    I think the filmic equivalent, at least in my opinion, is the ‘found footage’ stories such as Blair Witch and Cloverfield, which were overdone but can be very effective.

  4. Posted by J Michael Cule at 12:17pm on 18 November 2022

    Gosh, that's true! How neat!

    All we need now is a movie in which the people putting the various accounts of an event together... Oh, wait that's RASHOMON. (Which I have never seen.)

  5. Posted by RogerBW at 12:35pm on 18 November 2022

    I suppose by our definitions of influential films we really ought to watch The Blair Witch Project. I confess that I have little desire to do so.

    My wife saw it in a student film club in Bristol. Overheard: "Why don't they just follow the river downhill?" "Because they're Americans."

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