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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Glengarry Glen Ross 02 August 2025

Roger and Nick get terribly macho ans sweary (we're role-players, we can handle it) with Glengarry Glen Ross (1992).

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Tags: drama

  1. Posted by Robert at 03:19pm on 02 August 2025

    Working in corporate America from 2000 to today I will say this quoted in an aspirational or “motivational” fashion by people who have never heard of Raging Bull.

    I agree this is an insidious piece of memetics and the “third place prize is you’re fired” moment is quoted in a way that makes me think it is how a number of actual people view positional power being used effectively.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 11:40am on 04 August 2025

    When I've heard "always be closing" from sales types, it's always been in an unironically positive way. But if AI is teaching us anything, it's that you really don't need a sentient being to deliver a sales pitch tailored to what the user wants to hear.

    I also wonder how much of a prize the Cadillac El Dorado is mean to be. Looking now at it, even the gen11 that would have been available at the time looks quite old-fashioned for the 1990s, even if it has a lot of luxury features. It's certainly nothing like the BMW that the Actually Successful Guy drives. Though I may be biased by my feeling that if you need steak knives you should be buying better steak instead.

  3. Posted by RogerBW at 03:40pm on 06 August 2025

    I find it mildly amusing when the endless torrent of blog spam promises to "unlock more leads" in a comment on this film.

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