Playwright David Mamet (pictured) will be maintaining a blog to promote his new Broadway play, November, which stars Nathan Lane as contemporary American president Charles Smith and Laurie Metcalf as his lesbian speech writer. What’s interesting, perhaps, is that Mamet will be writing the blog – which he says he’ll update for the duration of the open-ended run – as President Smith. Sample entry from Monday:CONGRESSIONAL PAGE SEX SCANDALS It seems to me that, at......

MOVIES: A lavishly restored print of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s visionary film The Holy Mountain has been making the rounds this year; it’s back again this weekend at IFC Center for a pair of midnight screenings. First released in 1973, The Holy Mountain has grown into a cult classic for its surreal, psychedelic imagery and a serpentine, metaphysical storyline, which takes as inspiration, among other things, "The Ascent of Mt. Carmel" by St. John of......

Broken English (directed by Zoe Cassavetes) The pressure on a first time director is steep enough as it is, but if you're the daughter of celebrated '70s auteur John Cassavetes it's got to be extra tough. Unfortunately for the naysayers, Cassavetes delivered an intriguing character study wrapped inside a fluffy romantic comedy for her first feature film, Broken English, which comes out on DVD this week. Long time indie muse Parker Posey stars as Nora,......

Last summer, audiences fell hard for Owen Wilson's aging frat boy with a heart of gold routine in The Wedding Crashers. This weekend, he brings his lunkhead prat falls to the comedy You, Me and Dupree with co-stars Matt Dillon, Kate Hudson and Michael Douglas. From the previews it looks like most of the humor is scatological in nature but do you really need anything more complex in an A/C-tastic cineplex? Another movie up that......

Here at Gothamist theater, we tend to let the weather affect our views on shows to see more than is perhaps logical, though when there’s so much to see, at least it gives us some way of deciding. Anyway, this being the case, naturally outdoor shows have a special place in our heart, and this week one of (if not the absolute) the first outdoor shows is on: the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre’s The Bass Saxophone,......

We just read Steve Fishman's feature on the NYU senior/con man, Hakan Yalincak (the NYU senior who was arrested after a $43 million bank fraud), and his family and fortunes (?), and Gothamist must say, it feels like the makings of an early David Mamet film. For instance, Fishman, decides to ask Yalincak's mother, Jackie, who has recently been charged with playing a part in the schemes, if he can speak to someone who has......

If you’re like Gothamist and you enjoy new theatre in small venues (with small ticket prices), theater festivals are unbeatable. If you don’t go to shows much but want to get a taste for what’s out there, again, these gatherings of innovative voices and acting talents are the way to go. In the summer months, festivals arrive thick and fast; the first wave begins this week. In Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Marathon 2005, which started Wednesday,......

As Gothamist reads more and more about the NYU senior, Hakan Yalincak, and his scamming ways, the more we think we're reading a David Mamet play. The NY Post says that Yalincak and his mom rented an office "furnishing it with mahogany desks and plush, silk-upholstered chairs," "ordered thousands of dollars in computer equipment, hired temporary workers to monitor the Bloomberg stock tickers and shuttled investors in and out of the conference room." The man......

Just what the world was waiting for! The NY Times reports that Arianna Huffington is starting a celebrity group blog with people like "Walter Cronkite, David Mamet, Nora Ephron, Warren Beatty, James Fallows, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Maggie Gyllenhaal, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer and Mortimer B. Zuckerman." Huh. Did Huffington read the Businessweek article about blogs changing business and decide, "It's on"? It'll be called Huffington Post, the NY Times article......

The City - well, the Mayor at least - welcomes the GOP to the greatest city in the world today for four days of politics. On today's schedules: Mayor Bloomberg and the Gatlin Brothers in the morning, and Mayor Giuliani and Senator John McCain, with celebrities Ron Silver and Jason Sehorn and Angie Harmon, this evening. It's like a more innocent time again, of broken-window police strategy and elephant dung being the big NYC issue,......

John Hodgman, Writer...