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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Nosferatu (1922) and Shadow of the Vampire (2000) 16 July 2022

Roger and Nick discuss Nosferatu (1922) and Shadow of the Vampire (2000).

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Tags: horror

  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 02:05pm on 21 July 2022

    There's a fine realisation of the exotic locations in the early scenes of DRACULA, fixing the image of the haunted Carpathians in the mind of generations of Anglo-Saxons by an Irishman who had never been there.

    When the scene moves to Rngland the theme of sexuality (originally focussed on Jonathan's fascination with the Brides) turns to Dracula's seduction of Pure English Womanhood. Lucy becomes that most terrible of things, a sexually active woman, and Mina Harker becomes Impure. (The subtext of sexually transmitted disease is fascinating in a horrible way.)

    The good parts of the novel do tend to carry the less accomplished bits. It's an epistolatory novel and the clunkiness of that form makes it creak a fair bit. The dreadful characterisation of Van Helsing (and his inconsistent Dutch/German accent), the even worse characterisation of the American suitor, all are things that make the last third of the novel a bit of a chore.

    The good bits of DRACULA lead to the better bits of later works. (The two COUNT YORGA movies and Polanski's DANCE OF THE VAMPIRE are among my favourites.)

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 02:16pm on 21 July 2022

    Well, Stoker was (probably) no stranger to sexually transmitted disease. The Brides aren't here at all and I don't think the films suffer by their absence.

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