Interview: Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu of Cinematic Titanic

Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu may not have invented wisecracking about mediocre B-movies like Doomsday Machine and Danger On Tiki Island but, as two of the stars of cult-favorite TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000, they raised it to an art form. Though MST3K was canceled in 1999, it found new life on DVD, and in 2007 Hodgson and Beaulieu got the band back together, along with fellow founding movie-riffers Frank Conniff, J. Elvis Weinstein, and Mary Jo Pehl for the spin-off project Cinematic Titanic, which has released about a dozen new DVDs carrying on the movie-mocking tradition. The Titanic crew kicks off an extensive fall U.S. tour with three shows at Minneapolis’ Parkway Theater Sept. 15-17, tackling Doomsday Machine, War Of The Insects, and Rattlers, the latter two of which will be filmed for future live DVDs. (For more, click here.) The A.V. Club talked with Hodgson and Beaulieu about raising the Titanic, staying frosty, and the secret of Torgo’s huge thighs.

Originally published Sept. 13, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

‘Mystery Science’ alums know bad movies better than anyone

When it comes to enduring bad movies, the comedians of “Cinematic Titanic” have more experience than most. Featuring five founding members of cult TV hit “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” “Titanic” continues the tradition of making fun of the foibles of B-movie bombs like “Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks” and “The Oozing Skull.” The crew will take their show on the road for a 19-city tour this fall starting Sept. 15-17 in Minneapolis; details can be found at cinematictitanic.com.

We talked to Titanic’s Frank Conniff, J. Elvis Weinstein, and Trace Beaulieu about what makes a movie truly wretched.

Originally published Aug. 26, 2011 on MSNBC.com. Read the complete article.

Interview: Roe Family Singers

Quillan Roe has always loved country and folk music, first making his name in the Twin Cities music scene as leader of ’90s alt-country combo Accident Clearinghouse, which blended alt-country with a healthy strain of traditional bluegrass. In the Roe Family Singers, Roe and his wife Kim have embraced old-school folk with genuine joy. For proof, just stop by the 331 Club on any Monday night, where the Roes have held court for more than six years. “We’ve only missed twice,” notes Quillan with pride. “One year it was Christmas, and the next it was Christmas Eve.”

The weekly gig began as an open stage, says Roe: “We didn’t know enough material to fill even the hour and a half we were booked for, so we put out a call to pretty much any musician that we knew.” But it’s since solidified into a loose-knit nine-member combo of considerable verve, shaking the roof of the cozy Northeast bar with Depression-era blues and gospel tunes. The band takes over the 331 this weekend to release its sprightly second album, The Owl And The Bat And The Bumblebee, headlining Friday night with Lisa Fuglie & Mark Anderson and The Cactus Blossoms, and Saturday night with the Como Avenue Jug Band, as well as performing an all-ages in-store at the Electric Fetus on Saturday at 3 p.m. The Roes sat down with The A.V. Club to talk about balancing murder ballads with kids’ lullabies, and winning the Stanley Cup of waffle irons.

Originally posted on avclub.com June 17, 2011. Read the complete article.

Interview: Little Man

Little Man’s new six-song EP might be called Orbital Amusements, but it’s grounded in swampy, earthy riffage like nothing the band has done before. That’s neither a bad thing, or an unrecognizable shift: The crunchy, swirling, and psychedelic ’70s sound of T. Rex and Led Zeppelin is still there in guitarist and songwriter Chris Perricelli’s playing, and the George Harrison-esque, Zen Buddhist-inspired spirituality in his lyrics is as strong as ever. But Amusements thunders in a whole new way, thanks to the the jolt of creative electricity Perricelli got when his restless muse found a new way to make noise via—technical guitar-geekery alert—a new set of custom-made guitar pedals. With a new, more propulsive rhythm section in bassist Brian Herb and drummer Sean Gilchrist, Little Man’s sound is now flavored with a thick grunge-metal that Gilchrist jokingly but memorably describes as “dirty rumble beefy.” Little Man plays an album-release show for Orbital Amusements at the Turf Club on Friday, May 27 with Red Pens and The Rockford Mules—and onstage accompaniment by, appropriately enough, a pair of hula-hooping dancers, The Cosmonettes. Before the show, The A.V. Club talked with the band about how the new songs grew out of both cutting-edge tech and old-school spiritual symbology.

Originally published May 26, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Interview: Color Me Obsessed director Gorman Bechard

There’s something missing from Color Me Obsessed, director Gorman Bechard’s new documentary about Minneapolis music legends The Replacements: the band itself. Bechard purposefully avoided putting Paul Westerberg or his bandmates in the film directly—no interviews, no music, no concert footage, no album covers. But what seems at first to be a self-defeating approach is perhaps uniquely suited to The Replacements, a band so infamously disinterested in its own fame that its members once tried to steal their master tapes and throw them in a river, and flipped the bird to the whole idea of MTV by making a music video consisting entirely of a speaker playing “Bastards Of Young” for three and a half minutes. As its title implies, Color Me Obsessed is about the band’s fans as much as it is about the band itself. By not directly including The Replacements in the film, its subject broadens beyond simple biography into an exploration of what it means to be a fan, and to have your life changed by a song. Obsessed tells The Replacements’ story, from formation to early ’90s flameout, through the words of fans, critics, and contemporaries from the Minnesota music scene, including HüDüant Hart and Greg Norton, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, Kids In The Hall’s Dave Foley, and Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy. The A.V. Club talked with Bechard in advance of Color Me Obsessed’s Minneapolis debut, 7 p.m. May 4 at the Woman’s Club, as part of Sound Unseen.

Originally published May 2, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

In Tune With Nature: Cloud Cult mixes music and environmentalism

Since he was a child, Craig Minowa’s two driving passions have been music and environmentalism. As the leader of critically acclaimed indie-rock band Cloud Cult, he’s built a career that puts both at the center of his life.

Cloud Cult began as a solo project in 1995, while Minowa was an environmental sciences student at the University of Minnesota. It has grown into a group that’s earned a devoted cult following for its philosophical and expansive indie-rock on albums such as “Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes)”, “The Meaning Of 8” and its latest disc, “Light Chasers.”

During that time, Minowa and his wife and bandmate Connie Minowa have been trailblazers in greening the music industry through Earthology, a nonprofit organization that functions as Cloud Cult’s record label as well as, more recently, the umbrella for their environmental projects outside of music, including Connie’s green outreach work with local Indian tribes.

Originally published May 1, 2011 in Momentum, the magazine of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. Read the complete article.

Around The World And Home: The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival

In Jules Verne’s day, going around the world took 80 days. The space shuttle does it in 90 minutes now, but you don’t get to see much along the way. Luckily, there’s a third option, which does not even require leaving the St. Anthony Main multiplex: This week, the annual Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival returns with an expanded lineup, marking its largest year ever. This year’s slate includes 170 films, with more than 100 feature-length movies and 10 collections of short films, a heavy contingent of Minnesota-made movies, and a wide array of films made in countries from Peru to Tibet to Cuba to Kyrgyzstan. The festival includes themed programs of experimental and French cinema, movies about music, the kid-friendly Childish series, and a late-night horror/sci-fi series. To hold all that, MSPIFF is expanding to three full weeks, April 14-May 5, followed by the audience-chosen Best Of Fest series the week of May 6.

Thursday’s opening-night lineup includes a tent party and a trio of movies that all, in their way, should resonate with Minnesotans. The documentary Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times features former Twin Cities Reader editor David Carr, who’ll be attending; Trollhunter is a Blair Witch-esque mockumentary about a team of Norwegian monster-chasers; and then there’s the self-explanatory Score: A Hockey Musical. The closing-night film is equally Twin Citian: The romantic drama Stuck Between Stations stars locally born Josh Hartnett, was filmed in town, features a plethora of local bands, and even takes its title from a song by The Hold Steady.

The A.V. Club talked to festival programmers Ryan Oestreich and Jesse Bishop—who are part of a team led by venerable festival founder Al Milgrom and co-programmer Tim Grady—about this year’s films.

Originally published April 14, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Interview: The Sunny Era

Ironically, losing half the band was what led The Sunny Era to radically expand its sound. When its original guitarist and bassist left to start families, the local trio realized that the remaining musicians shared a love of world music. The result, last year’s This Darkness Of Love, was a seismic shift from the straight-up indie rock of its debut, adding Spanish, Middle Eastern, and particularly gypsy instrumentation. The band’s new disc, Gone Missing, pushes even further in that direction, cooking up a tasty indie-pop/gypsy fusion that should pique the interest of any DeVotchKa fans. The A.V. Club sat down with guitarist/vocalist Eric Stainbrook, multi-instrumentalist Laila Stainbrook, and percussionist Rob Foehl in advance of The Sunny Era’s CD release show on Saturday, April 16, at Loring Theater with Lucy Michelle & The Velvet Lapelles and Zoo Animal.

Originally published April 13, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Limitless’ brainpower plot isn’t all that crazy

Recent films offer up some weird science, but believe it or not, some of it’s quite possible

When it comes to science-fiction movies, the fiction tends to trump the science. And that can be just fine — movies are supposed to be entertaining, and nothing saps the joy out of them more quickly than complaining that there’s no sound in space, so the Death Star should’ve exploded in total silence. You’ve got to meet the movie halfway. But it’s also hard to do that unless the filmmakers give you some plausible reason to believe that tyrannosaurs could be resurrected, or Captain Kirk could beam himself up.

We looked at a half-dozen recent movies — including the new thriller “Limitless,” out March 18 — to see how their science stacked up, and whether their near-future inventions would be anything we’d actually want to see in real life.

Originally published March 7, 2011 on msnbc.com. Read the complete article.

Can young ‘Potter’ stars maintain career magic?

Wizard franchise made them famous, but breaking free of these roles could be tough

The magic is ending soon for the long-running Harry Potter series, which will close out with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” being released in two parts Nov. 19 and July 2011. But filming is already over for its three stars — Daniel Radcliffe, who plays the boy wizard, and Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, who play his best friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley.

Now it’s time for them to look ahead to their future, and answer a question even a Hogwarts professor might have trouble seeing in a crystal ball: Can they make the transition from child actors to successful grown-ups?

It’s not an easy one for any young celebrity, says Stephanie Zacharek, chief film critic for Movieline. “Because they’re working in this very weird world, a lot of things can go wrong for them. It isn’t what we would call a normal way to grow up. Different child actors handle it with varying degrees of success.”

Originally published on msnbc.com Nov. 15, 2010. Read the complete article.