Charlie Watts - Modern Drummer Magazine

“I probably was a typical musician, but I wasn’t, and am still not, a Rolling Stone. I mean, I am because that’s what I do, but the other stuff is bullshit. I don’t know what the Rolling Stones are. For that you should talk to someone else other than me. I don’t know what they are. To me, they’re friends of mine. They are whatever you’ve read and they’re worse and they’re better. I never read the bullshit in the papers and I don’t have to hide in hotel rooms. I used to do that and I hated it. The worst time in my life was about the time the Rolling Stones became like the Beatles, I suppose. There were girls screaming and carrying on and I couldn’t stand it because I thought it was silly. I loved it for what it meant and what the band was doing, but I couldn’t stand not being able to do anything. I hated that. That doesn’t mean anything and I never wanted that. I’m just not interested in that. The only time I love attention is when I walk on stage, but when I walk off, I don’t want it. For the band, I want everyone to love us and go crazy, but when I walk off, I don’t want it. I guess I want both worlds. I never could deal with it and I still can’t. I don’t know how Mick does it. He’s an incredible man. So is Keith—an amazing guy. I don’t know how they do it, I’m serious. Like doing so many interviews. This is the only time I’ve so much as spoken to a journalist this whole tour and the reason I’m doing this is because drumming is something that I love.”

Mr. Topaze (1961) **

Sellers the actor is very good, but Sellers the director lets the others run amok. It also feels like a good 30 minutes could be cut and it's only an hour and 37 minutes to begin with. Well shot though.

Annette (2021) *

Technical triumph and the allegorical nature might have been acceptable had the songs not been so resolutely awful and the main character not so completely unlikable. A tremendous waste of Devyn McDowell (who steals the picture in one scene) and the best marionette work in film since Being John Malkovich.

The Night of the Iguana (1964) **

Star power aplenty and a gorgeous location make this mostly tedious Williams play watchable.

Psycho (1960) ****

Iconic, massively influential, bold, daring and extremely well made. So many scenes, even though they've been imitated so often over the years, still hold their own and surprise. Even the clunky finale can't diminish it.

Algiers (1938) **

Shot for shot remake, done better the first time.

The Legend of Frenchie King (1971) *

A hint of self-awareness might have made this enjoyable. As is it is a waste of two lovely leads.

Paprika (2006) *

Superbly animated, but the repetitive dreamlands gets tiresome.

The Medusa Touch (1978) *

A fine cast in a deadly dull and misbegotten "horror" flick.

The Return of Martin Guerre (1982) ***

Thought provoking tale of 16th century Basque area of France with exceptional cinematography, art direction and acting.

Contagion (2011) ***

Expertly made neo-disaster flick can no longer be called science fiction unfortunately (it is more faithful to facts than many so-called documentaries). Hard hitting, no nonsense procedural with a stellar A list cast.

Into the Night (1985) ***

Michelle on the run with lots of celebrities gleefully playing the bad guys in cameos. Fun but just a tad too long.

A Quiet Place Part II (2020) **

More of the same without the panache of the original.

The Last Seduction (1994) **

Neo-noir has one of the more vicious femme-fatales, played to perfection by Ms. Fiorentino, but never seems to gel.

The Naked Kiss (1964) ***

Some pretty racy content mixed with some over the top sentiment all handled deftly within a shoestring budget.

The Trip to Greece (2020) ***

Fourth enjoyable romp this time with a bit more gravitas thrown in.

French Exit (2020) **

Enjoyable as a showcase for the singular Ms. Pfeiffer but that's about it.

The scientists hired by big oil who predicted the climate crisis long ago | The Guardian

When I started consulting for Exxon, I had already begun to understand that the Earth’s climate would be affected by carbon dioxide. There were only a small number of people in the world who were actively working on this problem because the global warming signal had not yet manifested itself in the data. So I was invited to join a research group at Exxon and one of my conditions to join was that we would publish our scientific research in peer-reviewed journals. It was a bunch of geeks trying to figure out how the planetary atmosphere works. We were doing very good work at Exxon. We had eight scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, including a prediction of how much global warming from carbon dioxide buildup would be 40 years later. We made a prediction in 1980 of what the atmospheric warming would be from fossil fuel burning in 2020. We predicted that it would be about one degree celsius. And it is about one degree celsius. It never actually occurred to me that this was going to become a political problem. I thought: “We’ll do the analyses, we’ll write reports, the politicians of the world will see the reports and they’ll make the appropriate changes and transform our energy system somehow.” I’m a research scientist. In my field, if you discover something and it turns out to be valid, you’re a hero. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to convince people, even when they saw objective evidence of this happening.

Blockade (1938) **

Heavy handed pro Spanish Civil War Republican propoganda is surprisingly well made. Hank Fonda is very good here.

Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report) (1955) ***

Orson overdoes the Dutch angles, but otherwise an entertaining romp through Europe with one of the great directors having fun.