Myrna the Monster, Ian Samuels’s 2015 short film that secured him a spot on our 25 New Faces of Film list that same year, is finally available to watch online via the filmmaker’s personal Vimeo account. The titular monster is voiced by Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin frontwoman) and embodied by an elaborate puppet that Samuels, a former Sesame Street employee and graduate of CalArts’s puppetry program, crafted himself. Filmmaker editor-in-chief Scott Macaulay penned Samuels’s 25 New Faces profile, describing the plot of the 14-minute short as follows: Hovering just around 3 feet, Myrna — […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jul 20, 2023For many, Kathleen Hanna — frontwoman for the bands Bikini Kill and later Le Tigre — was the defining protopunk, feminist icon of the Clinton and W. eras. A centrifugal force whose career spans the entire era in which the genre folks used to call Alternative Rock grew and waned in popularity, this riot grrrl mysteriously left the public eye in the mid aughts without any explanation. In The Punk Singer directed by Sini Anderson, a friend of Ms. Hanna’s, and produced by the music video auteur and CB4 director Tamra Davis, she reemerges from the shadows of semi-retirement. The film […]
by Brandon Harris on Nov 30, 2013Originally published following The Punk Singer‘s premiere at SXSW, this interview with director Sini Anderson, subject Kathleen Hanna and executive producer Tamra Davis is being rerun today as the documentary opens in New York at IFC Center. Hanna will be doing Q&A’s with Lizz Winstead of The Daily Show and signing copies of her new Julie Ruin record. Check the IFC page for times. In Greil Marcus’s punk-rock critical opus Lipstick Traces, the writer describes a kind of magic created by the sneering music of the Sex Pistols: “… the pop magic in which the connection of certain social facts […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 9, 2013SXSW is a festival of contradictions. (Or, “Spring Break for filmmakers,” as Ti West posted on his Twitter stream last night.) Its film program feels homey, intimate, with Janet Pierson and her team evincing a real sense of enthusiasm as well as curatorial play. There are, of course, types of films that are expected and do well at SXSW: cutting-edge genre titles, hip mainstream features, music- and technology-themed documentaries, and low-budget, youth-oriented relationship tales. But within and even outside of those categories, SXSW always turns up some real discoveries. (Last year there were several — Sean Baker’s Starlet, Andrew Neel’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 6, 2013In the ’90s, Sarah Jacobson was a rising indie filmmaker. Beginning with her half-hour short film I Was A Teenage Serial Killer in 1993, she garnered enough underground critical success to make her feature debut, Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore, a coming-of-age tale about a teenage girl’s loss of virginity and her friends’ experiences with their first times. Jacobson was set to move on to bigger films, but she sadly passed away from endometrial cancer at age 32 in 2004. To carry on her life’s work and support for fellow filmmakers, Jacobson’s mother and film producer Ruth Jacobson and […]
by Melissa Silvestri on Nov 11, 2010