The Fiery Furnaces’ Eleanor Friedberger, who has temporarily gone solo with her excellent LAST SUMMER disc, will be playing 4Knots on Saturday (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
South Street Seaport, Pier 17
Saturday, July 16, free, 1:00 – 8:00
www.villagevoice.com/4knots
For ten years, the Village Voice sponsored the Siren Festival, a free, all-day celebration in Coney Island that featured a virtual who’s who of the indie music scene, including such emerging and established groups as Superchunk, Guided by Voices, Sleater-Kinney, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, TV on the Radio, M.I.A., and Matt and Kim. As much fun as Siren was, it was held on two stages several blocks apart, so if you wanted to see bands in both places, you had to run back and forth down the boardwalk and lose your coveted space at one stage and hope you’d be able to get a decent spot at the other. There will be no such decision making at the inaugural 4Knots Music Festival, which has replaced Siren as the Voice’s annual summer party, and the venue has moved to the much more manageable South Street Seaport. The lineup consists of three Brooklyn bands, Mr. Dream, Eleanor Friedberger, and Oberhofer, along with San Juan’s Davila 666, New Jersey’s Titus Andronicus, and the headliner, the Austin-based Black Angels. If it gets too hot, you can take a break in the 4Knots Indoor Lounge at 210 Front St., with DJ sets from 2:00 to 12 midnight from Brahms, Punches, Finger on the Pulse, iPhone FJ Bugs Duck (Dan Deacon), and Yeasayer. As with the now-silenced Siren, 4Knots offers a great opportunity to check out a wide range of cool indie bands, and it’s all free.
Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris’s ninth feature-length film is a lighthearted look at self-delusion, tabloid journalism, and just how far someone might go for love. In 1977, a story broke in England about Joyce McKinney, a young woman accused of kidnapping a Mormon missionary, chaining him to a bed, and forcing him to have sex with her for three days. But the former beauty queen claimed that it was completely consensual, that she and Kirk Anderson were in love but that he was being brainwashed by his religious leaders. Morris speaks at length with the vivacious and engaging McKinney, who clearly loves talking about herself and her sex life. Morris also interviews two of the British journalists who originally covered the sordid story, the Mirror’s Kent Gavin and the Daily Express’s Peter Tory; while one bought McKinney’s tale hook, line, and sinker, the other discovered that there was a lot more to this crazy character. Much of the charm of Tabloid, which Morris calls a return to the “sick, sad, and funny” genre he explored in such earlier works as 1978’s Gates of Heaven and 1981’s Vernon, Florida, involves the many twists and turns the tale takes; just wait until cloning enters the picture. Along the way, Morris eschews the re-creations he often uses in his films in favor of unrelated clips that heighten the tone and mood but often feel like unnecessary overkill. In the end, it doesn’t really matter who’s telling the truth; as with so much tabloid journalism, it’s all in the salacious details. While the misnamed Tabloid — the film is really about McKinney herself much more than British journalism in general — doesn’t hit the serious notes of such Morris gems as The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, and Standard Operating Procedure, it’s still a hell of a lot of fun.
In the stunning Dersu Uzala, director-cowriter Akira Kurosawa has fashioned one of cinema’s greatest characters, a worldly-wise, deceptively simple charming man who understands life, nature, responsibility, and helping others. Tuvan actor Maksim Munzuk gives a marvelously understated performance as the title character, a hunter who is suddenly taken out of his quiet life of solitude when Russian army troops come to Siberia. Based on the 1923 memoir of Russian explorer Vladimir Klavdiyevich Arsenyev, the dazzling achievement focuses on the friendship between Uzala and Arsenyev (Yuri Solomin) as they battle the elements from Siberia to the city of Khabarovsk. Winner of the 1975 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Dersu Uzala will be screening at 11:00 am on July 14, 15, and 16 as part of the IFC Center’s Weekend Classics — Kurosawa series, which continues with Ran (July 22-24), Dreams (July 29-31), and Rhapsody in August (August 5-7); ticket sales benefit 
