At a lively memorial for Norman Mailer held yesterday at Carnegie Hall, the esteemed author’s son claimed to channel his father’s spirit, a feat that turned into a tongue-in-cheek impersonation of Mailer that brought the house down. According to the Post, 42-year-old Stephen Mailer, one of nine Mailer children, stepped up to the podium, raised his arms like a revivalist, and shouted "Come on, old man, I'm all yours.”He then fell to the ground as......

Kaki King (MySpace) is a guitar player and singer-songwriter from Atlanta, Georgia. She lived in Brooklyn for 7 years until last summer, when music started taking her on a permanent tour around the world. Her upcoming album is called Dreaming Of Revenge and will be released March 11th on Velour Records. King was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Original Score for the music she played in the Sean Penn film Into the Wild,......

SFist witnessed a student interrupt Sean Penn's Dennis Kucinich-endorsement speech at San Francisco State University, with sexy results. Sort of. Speaking of sort of sexy, SFist readers demanded to know: at what age does one become a cougar most? In local political news, it looked like San Francisco Public Utilities Commission chief Susan Leal might get the ax. Au revoir! And we found a startling aesthetic connection between the Omaha mall shooter and Rick......

The Gotham Awards gala run by the Independent Feature Project (IFP) will be held in Brooklyn for the first time tonight, after 17 years spent bouncing around between Roseland, Hammerstein Ballroom and Chelsea Piers. This year the independent film awards will take place on the soundstage of Steiner Studios in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Among the thousand-plus guests expected to attend are Javier Bardem, Sean Penn, Laura Linney, Uma Thurman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Brooklyn’s......

Into the Wild (directed by Sean Penn) Chris McCandless wanted to utterly divorce himself from civilization. He gave away all of his money, abandoned his car, changed his name and cut off all ties with his family. Adventure journalist Jon Krakauer wrote a very moving account of the young man's experiences tramping around the United States for two years and then spending four months living in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilds before dying......

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

February 10th and 17th, class is in session at the UCB Theater. Welcome to the Al Pacino School of Acting , where you learn from the master, portrayed by Cesar Gracia. Audience members will have the opportunity to pick up some of the tricks of the trade as Pacino calls them onstage and brings out the true auteur in them. Miami got David Caruso; NYC got William Peterson. Who's better off? I'm from Miami so......

If you count yourself as a New Yorker and a movie lover, it's tough to not have a special affinity for films by Woody Allen. Practically the filmmaker laureate of the city, Allen's prolific 40 plus year career is getting a three week long screening series at Film Forum starting this Friday. Gothamist loves Allen's movies (both the highs and the lows) so much that we thought we'd chat with an Allen expert, Queens College......

Holy mother of God. David Blaine is thinking about his next project (and probably the next five after that), and he wants it to be on the Brooklyn Bridge. In post-overhydration interview with the NY Post, Blaine says, "Challenging myself on this bridge has been my lifelong dream." And some people dream of finding a cure for cancer! And this would certainly be a challenge for the NYPD to secure the bridge. But we digress,......

It's official: Jon Stewart will host this year's Oscars telecast. Which means the Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to go for crowd-pleasing ('specially in liberal Hollywood) political commentary, versus another year of cruel but insightful wisecracks from Chris Rock. Hmm, Gothamist likes Jon Stewart, though we downgraded him after the frat-party audience atmosphere of the Daily Show started to detract from the show, but he is better than Whoopi Goldberg again.......

On Sundays, Gothamist runs opinion pieces on issues relevant to life in New York. The views expressed below belong entirely to the author. Tim Robbins and Sean Penn won Academy Awards for the intensity they put into their acting in Mystic River, and they were great, for sure – but they were acting in a movie with a plot that doesn’t exactly skimp on tense moments. Now imagine the same sort of slowly uncoiled, suspenseful......

In the urban jungle that is New York many different plants make their home. One of Gothamist's favorite plants is the striking and fragrant Chinese Wisteria (wisteria sinensis). If you've ever walked around the Village you've seen its thick vines and drooping leaves, not to mention its splendid purple, white and pink flowers in the spring. And in case you weren't sure what you were looking at this weeks Villager gives a good rundown......

Sidney Pollack's The Interpreter definitely makes a point of depicting the city in grand panoramic style, with plenty of overheads and shots on bridges. There are street scenes, as Nicole Kidman goes in and out of her apartment on Stuvesant and 10th, rides her Vespa up Lafayette Street and Fourth Avenue, and walks in and out of the U.N. building. There is even a few scenes in the outer boroughs, with nods to Crown Heights......

Okay, Gothamist admits it: The whole 50 Cent-The Game feud that may or may not have caused the shooting of an associate of The Game totally confuses us. First, the media reported that one of 50's crew was shot in the lobby of Hot 97 where 50 Cent was on the air dissing The Game (photo left, AP). But then the victim, who was shot in the upper leg-groin (ouchie), turned out to be a......

Wow, it seems like Christo and Jeanne-Claude are like the Sean Penn and Madonna of the art world - at least for a few moments - as Newsday reports that the most famous public-art touting-and-building couple, plus their photographer Wolfgang Volz, tussled with a Newsday reporter and photographer:Jeanne-Claude, whose saffron hair has evoked comparisons to the billowing bright sheets in Central Park, seemed to see red yesterday when a Newsday photographer tried to take......

This week, Gothamist chatted via the telephone with director Niels Mueller about his first feature film now in theaters, The Assassination of Richard Nixon. With his film an official selection at Cannes this year and starring Sean Penn, Mueller gave us insight into the connections between the fictional story and the real man, his Midwest roots and how much indie directors really know about high fashion. Basics I was born during the Kennedy administration, in......

One of Gothamist's favorite Midwesterners turned New Yorker would have to be Bob Dylan. Another being F. Scott. Both authors of a different time and caliber, now one has now written an autobiography (that being the, um, alive one). Dylan wrote his first book, Tarantula (an all lower case piece of fiction), in 1966. This time around he's written an account of his life entitled Chronicles, which he typed in all caps on a manual......

Another documentary that will be exploding on to big screens this summer is Riding Giants. A visually captivating look at big wave surfing, Riding Giants had the honor of being the first documentary ever selected to open the Sundance Film Festival. Directed by former skateboard punk Stacy Peralta (Dogtown & Z-Boys), the film is narrated by Sean Penn and features surfing legends Laird Hamilton, Greg Noll and Jeff Clark. Gothamist had the pleasure of......

Ever since watchdog groups wondered if Jodie Foster was victimized playing a young prostitute in Taxi Driver, the welfare of children acting in Hollywood is closely monitored. However, Gothamist is disturbed by one young rising star's current position as the go-to victim: Little Dakota Fanning, who stars in today's new release, Man on Fire. Not only is she playing yet another preternaturally aware little girl in today's new release whose charming ways soften the reserve......

For all you kiddies going to see Bill Murray's talk at BAM tonight, Gothamist wants to let you know this isn't the first time that Bill Murray has chatted with Times film critic Elvis Mitchell. If anyone watched Mitchell's old IFC program, Independent Focus, where he would interview directors and actors (watch David Lynch smoke like a chimney...see John Sayles make Elvis Mitchell cringe!), you might remember an episode with Jim Jarmusch and Bill Murray,......

Candice Waldron, TV Producer...

If you wondered how Bill Murray was doing after not getting the Oscar for Best Actor, well, the mystery is over. Murray appeared on Late Night with David Letterman...or, rather, he was discovered in a gutter by Late Night's camera crew. Gothamist didn't catch this bit, so thank you, Movie City News, for the .avi file of it. We like how Murray says the Oscars are a popularity contest and that Sean Penn won because......

Gothamist wants to be one of the first to say what everyone will be uttering tomorrow with more frequency than usual: Why does Melissa Rivers persist? Joan, we understand, because she can be funny, though lately it's been more outrageous than incisive. And we understand nepotism and accept Tori Spelling's wooden acting...but Melissa...she must be stopped. And when she tears into some poor, celebrity with a bad stylist, no stylist at all, or her/his own......

The Post comes up with a few ideas for Oscar drinking games during the ceremony: • An award winner forgets to thank his or her significant other. • An award winner says the words "blessed," "humbling" or "my agent." • The orchestra cuts off an acceptance speech. • Host Billy Crystal makes a Mel Gibson joke. • A camera cuts to Jack Nicholson. Gothamist would like to add someone saying "Oh my God" (we want......

If it involves movies or television, Gothamist is interested. And if it's the tiniest bit related to the Oscars, then we're all over it. That's why Gothamist has produced a Golden Globes commentary similar to our Oscar commentary from last year. Yes, awards shows are self-congratulatory and ridiculous, and the Golden Globes are not a reliable predictor of the Oscars (which aren't that great anyway but their usefulness as a marketing tool cannot be denied),......

And to make this travesty worse, you can feel the handsome little guy [Tom Cruise] "acting" with every fiber of his being. It's kind of unsettling. He resembles Sean Penn in "I Am Sam," except he seems to be shouting "I am Samurai." His face is a perpetual mask of scorn, his body a knot of anxiety, his eyes cranked down to laser glare. He's a poster boy for the concept of "trying too......

Opening night at the New York Film Festival is always fun in the grandeur of Avery Fisher Hall and stars in tow, and this past year was no different. Clint Eastwood began his introduction of his cast and crew (Mystic River author Dennis Lehane, screenwriter Brian Helgeland, and stars Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney, Tim Robbins, and Sean Penn) with what seems like the joke du mois - the California gubernatorial race joke: "I'm......

If it's fall, it must be time for the New York Film Festival. This year, the opening night film is Mystic River, the ensemble drama directed by Clint Eastwood. The cast is ridiculously loaded with great actors: Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins, Laura Linney, Marcia Gay Harden, and Laurence Fishburne. The story is dark, eliciting comparisons to Eastwood's tour de force western, Unforgiven, but its present day setting makes it more wrenching. Sean......

From Chick Lit to Chick Movie
Gothamist and its readers try to cast The Parker Grey Show.
...

Someday, Gothamist will go to the Cannes Film Festival. But until then, we will continue to get excited about films that premiere there and eagerly await for them to come Stateside. Like Mystic River, Clint Eastwood's adaptation of Dennis Lehane's bestselling novel. Gothamist had heard how wonderful a book Mystic River was ("Don't mind the 'New York Times Bestseller' and mass-market paperback size, Jen."), both in terms of the thrill and emotional story telling.......