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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Psycho (1960) and Rear Window (1954) 19 October 2024

Roger and Nick are invited to get all male-gazey again, in 1960's Psycho and 1954's Rear Window.

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Tags: drama horror

  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 02:27pm on 20 October 2024

    Two technical points about the murder scenes in PSYCHO:

    The blood in the shower scene was chocolate sauce.

    The murder on the stairs is a bit of a technical stunt (put together by the production designer I believe though at Hitchcock's direction). After Momma Bates comes out of the upper room and starts the attack the scene cuts to a medium close-up of the terrified face of the detective as he tumbles backwards down the stairs. And what is shown behind him is a back projection of the stairs and ceiling rolling over and over.

    It impressed me anyway.

    I was also impressed by Nick quoting Clarence Darrow whose defence also quoted A.E.Housman:

    The night my father got me
      His mind was not on me;
    He did not plague his fancy
      To muse if I should be
      The son you see.

    "No one knows what will be the fate of the child he begets. The weary world goes on begetting...and all of it is blind from beginning to end."

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