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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A History of Violence (2005) 24 September 2022

Roger and Nick discuss A History of Violence (2005).

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Tags: action

  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 01:00pm on 24 September 2022

    My old dad was a bit worried about my enthusiasm (at about the age of thirteen) for Lewis so he gave me a critical article about him, pointing out all the peculiar bits in it that spring from his Christian viewpoint. The one that sticks with me is pointing out the bit in THE HORSE AND HIS BOY where Aslan rips the heroine's back with his claws. A perfectly just punishment (it turns out) for the time she had caused a servant of hers to be flogged.

    Oddly this did not put me off the books though it did perhaps make me understand them better.

    Roger's right about how modern movies fail to capture the relationship between adults and children then but I know full well it's changed since I were a lad and THE L,THE W & THE W is set in the 1940s. I'm not sure that time is easily recoverable.

    I liked the Narnia movies (though I had problems with the adaptations) but I suspect they couldn't have done more than one of the remaining ones due to the fact that they get darker and two of them have inbuilt Islamophobia: the pseudo-Arabic Calmorens are actually worshipping the devil though they don't know this.

    I would have liked to have seen Imelda Staunton do Jadis one more time in THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW though.

    (I do feel slightly differently about Tim Powers now that someone has pointed out to me that all his books assume that Christianity and specifically Catholicism is the Real Truth.)

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 10:33am on 25 September 2022

    Lewis on film is complicated because American Evangelicals have factional divisions on whether he's a saint or a devil. So a production company can't tell which way the concerned parents' groups will be told to jump.

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