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.

RSS feed!

Rashomon (1950) 11 January 2025

Roger and Nick watch that classic of misdirection Rashomonor do we?

Download


  1. Posted by Lydia at 07:22am on 13 January 2025

    Yes, that's a good point. For saying it's a movie about unreliable witnesses, there are quite a few parts where the viewer is seemingly expected to credulously believe a character: The authenticity of the Medium, the Woodcutter's testament, the Woodcutter's selflessness regarding the baby, the Priests faith.

    I've always found the film a bit slow, but it's still an enjoyable movie. And it looks nice too. I think maybe it would be better if the accounts were a bit more varied and even told opposite stories rather than slight variations of the same thing. I think that would have made it more engaging to constantly have to reassess what happened. Maybe if the event get worse with each telling.

    Actually, there's an interesting panning shot of the Woodcutter at the beginning where the shot twists and goes all weird. Apparently that effect was done by the actor walking in a twisting route - ie. he wasn't walking in a straight line.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 09:35am on 13 January 2025

    There are lots of little bits that work well, but I think it suffers by comparison with later umitators that have been inspired by the core idea but taken it further. Whichever story is true, in the end the samurai is dead, Tajomaru is surely going to be executed, and the wife seems likely to go off to the period equivalent of a nunnery. he imitators I've seen have all gone to a lot of trouble to raise the stakes for the viewer by making it matter just what happened, because the outcomes will be different based on who believes what.

Add A Comment

Your Name
Your Email
Your Comment

Your submission will be ignored if any field is left blank, but your email address will not be displayed. Comments will be processed through markdown.

Search
Archive
Tags action comedy crime disaster documentary drama fantasy historical horror mystery noir romance satire science fiction thriller unclassifiable war
Special All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1