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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Blood Simple (1984) 20 November 2021

Roger and Nick discuss Blood Simple.

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Here is an extra bit, in which we talk about Fiasco and other games inspired by this sort of film.

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Tags: comedy drama

  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 01:57pm on 27 November 2021

    I first came across the pig as corpse disposal in OTLEY (1968) with Leonard Rossiter as the pig farmer.

    And if A and B cannot agree we go to fists. Or guns. Which is what you have the procedural systems for. (The fact I first saw this in a game of DOGS IN THE VINYARD may be prejudicing me.)

    I think a lot of game writers and GMs regard the bits of stories they don't care about as not worth bothering with. Don't know how you fix that. (I feel that way about shopping scenes.)

  2. Posted by Robert at 01:20am on 28 November 2021

    Godlike’s Will to Power supplement is an overall okay book.

    But the pages in it for Killing Disposition are very good and offer one of the best mechanical and qualitative RPG discussions of intra-species conflict I’m aware of.

  3. Posted by RogerBW at 04:09pm on 28 November 2021

    The willingness to kill is a strange thing – there's a lot of thinking predicated on that study that said "only X % of soldiers in WWII actually shot at the enemy" (published I think as Men Against Fire, Samuel Lyman Marshall), but this turns out to be packed with methodological problems.

    But the fascinating thing about a first killing done by firearm is that you can do it in an instant without the psychological preparation you'd need to beat someone to death or stick a knife in them – and then you may well come apart afterwards of course, which would account for some of the mistakes made here. (Or to put it another way, Proper Planning Prevents Legally Compromising Performance.)

  4. Posted by Robert at 01:37am on 30 November 2021

    There’s a fair bit of SLA Marshall in the discussion but it goes beyond the initial study.

    They discuss five facets of distance to killing disposition and physical and mechanical are both present. Working off the internal odds presented with the one roll engine, the step from knife range to pistol range would jump bog normal person from no chance at all to 10% and would kick someone with a bad attitude or a reason to act from 10% to 28%.

    It is focused on group combat settings though so with characters like the reprobates in this movie it’s more like stepping from 28% to 50%.

    Now I’m going to read GURPS Mysteries.

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