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 Call of Cthulhu (2005), Die Farbe (2010), The Whisperer in Darkness (2011) and Color Out of Space (2019) 22 July 2023

Nick and Roger indulge in a second slate of Lovecraft adaptations, with The Call of Cthulhu, Die Farbe, The Whisperer in Darkness and Color Out of Space.

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  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 02:19pm on 22 July 2023

    "Whwn I had more money than sense": has your store of sense increased or your bank balance dwindled?

    I haven't watched THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS but one thing that strikes me about watching the trailer: it was clearly shot with modern digital cameras and the quality of the image is just too sharp and too good for studio cinematography of the 1930s. It's even too good for 1950s to early 60s.

    THE CALL OF CTHULU on the other hand goes to considerable effort to make it look like a period piece and succeeds throughout most of the film.

    (And then I think: what did those films look like when first shown to audiences? Is what I think of as the 'period look' partly or mostly the result of the decay in the film stock?)

  2. Posted by Nick at 12:57am on 29 July 2023

    Sadly, Mike, very much the latter.

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