NIGHT AT THE MUSEUMS
Multiple downtown locations
Tuesday, June 210, free, 4:00 – 8:00
lmcc.net
nightatthemuseums.com
Last Tuesday, the Museum Mile Festival offered free admission to seven institutions along Fifth Ave. between 82nd and 105th Sts. This Tuesday, June 20, fifteen downtown organizations will open their doors for free. As part of the River to River Festival, which includes experimental dance, theater, music, and more through June 25, people are invited inside to see exhibitions and special programs as well as join walking tours. The participating organizations (with current exhibitions and special events) are the African Burial Ground National Monument (ranger presentations and screening of Our Time at Last), Federal Hall National Memorial (ranger tours, George Washington, Early American Music by Linda Russell), Fraunces Tavern Museum (“Dunsmore: Illustrating the American Revolutionary War,” “Lafayette,” live music by Rose Tree), the Museum of American Finance (“For the Love of Money: Blacks on US Currency,” hourly tours), the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (“My Name Is…The Lost Children of Kloster Indersdorf,” “Eyewitness: Photographs by B. A. Van Sise,” 6:30 talk on Jewish communities in China), the China Institute (“Dreams of the Kings: A Jade Suit for Eternity, Treasures of the Han Dynasty from Xuzhou,” live music), the National Archives at New York City, the National Museum of the American Indian (“Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait,” “Circle of Dance,” live performances by Martha Redbone), the National September 11 Memorial Museum, the NYC Municipal Archives (building tours with MA photographer Matthew Minor and MA commissioner), the 9/11 Tribute Center, Poets House (“Poetry Since 1912: Books, Issues, & Ephemera from the Poetry Foundation,” literary scavenger hunt), the Skyscraper Museum (“Ten and Taller, 1874-1900,” tour with founding director Carol Willis), and the South Street Seaport Museum (“Street of Ships: The Port and Its People,” Waterfront History Walking Tour, Bowne C. Stationers and Printers live demonstration).
Named the Outstanding Narrative Feature at the 2017 Sacramento Film Festival, Michael Clayton’s debut, The Dunning Man, begins with a rather strange shot of an American flag flying in the foreground as a plane heads toward the Chrysler Building, disappears behind it, then emerges on the other side. It’s impossible not to think about 9/11, but fortunately the rest of the film is a quirky little black comedy about the travails of poor Connor Ryan (James Carpinello), a man who hightails it out of New York, leaving his job and his rich girlfriend, and heads to Atlantic City, where he owns several apartments he’s leasing to tenants who don’t exactly pay him on time, if at all. “I hate thinking that the best I got coming for me is being Mr. Roper,” he tells his well-connected Uncle Bishop (Tom Kemp). But Connor doesn’t like accepting help from anyone, even when he’s trapped in some questionable situations. He’s kind of a schmegegge, a luckless loser who can’t catch a break. He’s rented one of his lo-rise condos to Gillian (Karen Howell), who lives with a pair of killer Chechen “warriors in the spirit of the wolf,” Ferdinand (Scott Oakley) and Ramos (Matthew Rimmer), who are members of a group that likes to have sex as furries. Meanwhile, he develops a friendship with his other tenant, Alice (Dawn-Lyen Gardner), a single mother with a violent boyfriend. Living above Alice is party animal Stryker Jones (Nicoye Banks), a rapper with a hit album who is lying relatively low as he struggles to make his follow-up record. Connor just wants a normal life, but he can’t stay out of trouble, refusing to sacrifice his principles even when his very existence is at stake.
The 2017 Human Rights Watch Film Festival comes to a close June 18 with the New York premiere of Brian Knappenberger’s Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, a deeply troubling Netflix original that looks into the growing battle between billionaires and the fourth estate, between a person’s right to privacy and freedom of the press. Knappenberger begins by exploring the landmark Bollea v. Gawker case, in which Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea, sued online media outlet Gawker for posting nine seconds of a tape depicting Bollea having sex with Heather Clem, the wife of his then-best friend, Todd Alan Clem, better known as radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge. The jury awarded Bollea $140 million, bankrupting Gawker, but Knappenberger reveals that the case was about a lot more than invasion of privacy — it was really about control of the media by the extremely wealthy. And Hogan/Bollea is not that wealthy. “Don’t be fooled into thinking that just because this case is so sleazy and rests on sex that it’s not important; this is one of the most important First Amendment cases in American history,” says Leslie Savan, who blogs on politics and the media for The Nation. “We’re talking about the very notion of truth,” she later adds. Knappenberger speaks extensively with Gawker cofounder Nick Denton, who defends what the company did as well as its overall journalistic ethics, covering stories that others wouldn’t; Knappenberger also meets with Gawker cofounder Elizabeth Spiers; former editor in chief A. J. Daulerio, who posted the Hogan story and sees himself as a patsy; former deputy editor James Wright; Hogan lawyers David Houston and Charles Harder; and former Gawker executive editor John Cook, who is boldly outspoken about Gawker’s purpose. “I wanted to write true things about bad people, and that’s what Gawker gave us all the freedom to do,” he says. First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams notes, “The reason to save Gawker was not because Gawker is worth saving. The reason to save it is that we don’t pick and choose what sort of publications are permissible, because once we do, it empowers the government to limit speech in a way that ought to be impermissible.” Among the other talking heads offering compelling insight are Politico media writer Peter Sterne, associate professor of journalism Jay Rosen, Buzzfeed business reporter Will Alden, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, and former New York Times columnist David Carr. The story takes a strange turn when it is discovered that there were potential improprieties involving Judge Pamela Campbell and that the lawsuit is being funded by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who was outed by Gawker in 2007 and is now exacting a dangerous kind of revenge. 
