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 and Google Podcasts.

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The Wicker Mans 17 October 2026

Rowan's not dead! The Wicker Man (1973) and The Wicker Man (2006).

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For 1974, here's The Wicker Man With the Golden Gun. For 2006, not the bees! Here are the full ending sequence and the comedy trailer.

Tags: horror

  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 02:30pm on 17 October 2026

    Thank you for watching the remake so I never have to.

    The most powerful moment of the original is the contrast between the villagers happily singing SUMMER IS IKUMEN IN while the policeman recites Psalm 23 and prays as death overwhelms him.

    Knowing that the remake goes out of its way to not do it that way confirms my general prejudice against remakes.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 02:51pm on 17 October 2026

    Oh boy you ain't avoided seeing nothing yet. (Contemplating two episodes ahead…)

    I genuinely believe the 2006 film could be a valuable lesson to a young filmmaker in how there's more going on in a good film than just a sequence of "this cool scene you can tell your friends about".

  3. Posted by Nick Marsh at 01:03am on 18 October 2026

    I don’t have general issues with remakes; some are actually improvements, or at least have something different to say, but holy smokes I have never seen such a difference between the heights of the original and the troughs of the remake than these two.

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