Lohan's Father Moving To L.A. To Support Her
 
Lindsay Lohan's father Michael is determined to rebuild his shattered relationship with his actress daughter - he's moving 2,400 miles (3,862 kilometres) to be closer to her.

Michael Lohan last month urged the troubled 24 year old to return to her native New York once she completed her court-ordered stint in rehab, insisting she can only put her problems behind her if she cuts herself off from Hollywood's partying lifestyle.

The Mean Girls star appears to have shunned his advice by staying in California - so Michael has jetted to Los Angeles from his home in the Big Apple to look for a permanent residence.

He has contacted a real estate agent and is hunting for a property in the city so he can support his daughter as she attends therapy sessions, according to TMZ.com.

And Michael is adamant the pair's relationship only fell apart because her mother, his ex-wife Dina, drove "wedges" between them.

He tells the website, "If wedges hadn't been put between us and people didn't use children as pawns, a lot of the problems suffered by children wouldn't happen."

The actress recently blamed her father for causing her personal problems, telling Vanity Fair magazine, "I think my biggest focus for myself is learning how to continue to get through the trauma that my father has caused in my life.”

Lindsay was sentenced to 90 days in jail in July for breaching her probation relating to a 2007 DUI arrest, and was ordered to undergo 90 days in rehab after leaving prison.

Douglas optimistic about beating cancer

LOS ANGELES — Michael Douglas said on Tuesday he felt optimistic about recovering from throat cancer but drew gasps when he told a television audience he had the most advanced stage.

The 65-year-old "Wall Street" actor told talk-show host David Letterman that a biopsy indicated that his cancer was at stage four, which he described as "intense, and so they've got to go at it ..."

Letterman asked whether stage IV was a good diagnosis. "Um no," Douglas replied, according to a transcript provided by CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman." "You like to be down at stage one ... but it has not — the big thing you're always worried about is it spreading."

Stage four cancer has spread far beyond the original tumor and is usually impossible to cure.

Douglas said he has at least an 80 percent chance of recovery. "And with certain hospitals and everything, it does improve."

"You've never looked better to me, and this proves that you're a tough guy, for God's sakes," Letterman said. "Let's just say ... I'm pretty lit up right now," Douglas replied.

According to the National Cancer Institute, patients with stage four head and neck cancer usually undergo surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

Douglas told Letterman he faces an "eight-week struggle" and he just finished his first course of radiation and chemotherapy treatment. "It's a fight," he told People magazine. "It really knocks you out."

Douglas told Letterman that his cancer was caused by his drinking and smoking.

He said his throat had been bothering him for a while, and a multitude of doctors put him through a battery of tests in the early summer, but had found nothing.

After a summer break, he underwent a biopsy, which revealed his advanced cancer.

He expressed frustration with the doctors who could not find anything, "because I was on it early in the summer and started complaining about something, but they couldn't see it then."

Catherine Zeta-Jones, Douglas's wife, told People it was difficult seeing her husband struggle with the disease. "The hardest part is seeing his fatigue, because Michael is never tired," she said, adding that he told their two children — Dylan, 10, and 7-year-old Carys — the news himself.

Can Lindsay Lohan's career be saved?
by Darren Franich

Six years ago, Lindsay Lohan was a redheaded ingenue, headlining a funkily twisted teen comedy written by embryonic supergenius Tina Fey. Lohan was already a Disney sweetheart, but Mean Girls seemed to announce her arrival as a major teen megastar. Almost instantly, everything went sour: Within a year, Lohan had gone blonde, and was beginning a four-way tango with the paparazzi, the L.A. club scene, and the criminal justice system. (In a weird way, Mean Girls anticipated all of this: her character goes from being a spunky outsider to a much-despised popular girl. So basically, Lindsay Lohan is to Mean Girls as Orson Welles is to Citizen Kane.) This summer, Lohan was released early from jail, and then rehab. In an interview from the new cover story of Vanity Fair, Lohan says, “I was irresponsible,” and compares her frantic last half-decade to living her college life in public. The question remains: Can Lindsay Lohan’s career ever really recover?

Short answer: yes, with an if. No career is ever really over. Mickey Rourke apparently spent 20 years living in a swamp, but he was propelled back into the mainstream by Robert Rodriguez, who gave the actor a redefining role in Sin City. Lohan is appearing in Rodriguez’s new film Machete as a gun-toting nun, which makes more sense than Just My Luck 2. If Lohan can reinvent herself, then she might start filling theaters again.

Long answer: no, with a but. It’s almost impossible to imagine a director like Robert Altman wanting to work with Lohan again. Heck, it’s hard to even imagine that any marketing department would put Lohan in a movie preview. Lohan wasn’t just a tabloid fixture: she was also the star of the some of the worst movies ever made (one of which provided us with the best PopWatch post ever). As excited as I am for Machete, it’s weird to think that, at the age of 24, Lohan is already getting the kind of cult-fetish role that Rourke was getting in his 50s. It seems to announce the beginning of a meta-phase of her career. (Same goes for the rumored biopic about Linda Lovelace. Come on, people, they even have the same initials!) Not that there’s anything wrong with playing a tabloid-ish version of yourself, but in Freaky Friday, Mean Girls, and even Bobby, Lohan was playing real characters. She was an actress. In the interview, Lohan says that she wants to be an actress again, and “if that takes not going out to a club at night, then so be it.” Let’s hope she’s telling the truth.

What do you think, PopWatchers? Can Lindsay Lohan become a true movie star again? Is it weird that, as my colleagues Keith Staskiewicz and Emily Exton pointed out, every other actress in Mean Girls has a more viable career now than Lohan? (Okay, maybe not Lacey Chabert, but that’s a different PopWatch post.)

ABANDONED -- DVD review by porfle
Monday, August 16, 2010

Melancholy is the feeling I got watching the late Brittany Murphy in her almost-last film appearance.  Never quite a favorite actress of mine, I still liked her in such films as FREEWAY, SIN CITY, and especially the ironically-titled THE DEAD GIRL.  As her penultimate swan song (a final film is currently in post-production), the suspense thriller ABANDONED (2010) isn't exactly memorable, but as a passable time-waster it holds its own quite well.

Brittany plays Mary, whose boyfriend of four months, Kevin (Dean Cain), is going into the hospital for simple knee surgery.  He's one of the last patients admitted into the old hospital as it's being closed down and relocated.  But when Mary returns to Kevin's room after several hours, he's gone and nobody remembers seeing him.  Not only that, but his doctor is on vacation, his nurse apparently never existed, and he isn't listed in any of their records. 

As Mary begins to panic and search the hospital on her own, dubious hospital administrator Markham (Mimi Rogers) and security chief Holloway (Scott Anthony Leet) imply that she's delusional.  Mary's only hope seems to be Detective Franklin (Jay Pickett), who's there for a check-up, although he also suspects that she's imagining the whole thing when a bottle of potent anti-depressants falls out of her purse.  She even starts to doubt her own sanity until she gets a frantic cell phone call from Kevin.  He's hurt, he doesn't know where he is, and he's in big trouble.

ABANDONED plays a lot like one of those old ABC Movie of the Week films like "Dying Room Only" with Cloris Leachman as a woman whose husband has mysteriously vanished from a roadside diner without a trace, and also reminds me of Michael Crichton's spooky 1978 hospital thriller COMA with Geneviève Bujold.  Mary's "Twilight Zone"-type predicament gets deeper and more complicated until finally there's a nifty surprise revelation that twists everything into a whole different direction, ending with an exciting action sequence within the dark bowels of the old hospital.  In the meantime, there's plenty of nerve-wracking cat-and-mouse stuff as she eludes her dogged and increasingly hostile pursuers in a desperate search for the missing Kevin.

Direction and production values are meat-and-potatoes stuff and the script is merely adequate, but once things get cranked up the story generates more than enough suspense to sustain interest.  As for plot holes and implausibilities, I try to go along with yarns like this without getting too hung up on such things if they're sufficiently glossed over.  Director Michael Feifer is an old hand at this kind of potboiler, having recently specialized in a number of fairly well-made DTV serial-killer flicks about Ted Bundy, Richard Speck, The Boston Strangler, The BTK Killer, Henry Lee Lucas, and Ed Gein.

Feifer has a good cast to work with here--I can imagine him taking special delight in directing a star like Brittany Murphy even though she's not quite at the top of her game here.  (An unfortunate case of "trout pout" caused by too much collagen proves a nagging distraction as well.)  Dean Cain is likable as Kevin, while former Mrs. Tom Cruise, Mimi Rogers, along with Peter Bogdanovich as a slimy psychiatrist intent on proving Mary a nutcase, suffice as possible bad guys for us to hiss.  Jay Pickett (Detective Franklin) is a veteran of several of Feifer's serial-killer flicks, while genre stalwart Tim Thomerson shows up as a genial old codger who gives Mary some emotional support while his wife endures chemotherapy. 

The DVD from Anchor Bay is in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen with 5.1 Dolby Digital sound.  Subtitles are in English and Spanish.  A trailer is the sole extra.

ABANDONED is the film equivalent of a fast-read pulp novel whose only aim is to entertain, and succeeds pretty well in doing so.  As one of our last looks at Brittany Murphy, it's something of a letdown only because we've seen her give better performances in much better movies.

Lindsay Lohan: 'I was irresponsible'

In a new interview — conducted before she went to jail or rehab — Lindsay Lohan claims her wild days are behind her.

"I was irresponsible. And I'm not making excuses," she says in October's Vanity Fair, according to USA Today and the New York Post, which feature excerpts from the issue.

She describes her partying days as her "college years . . . but they were in the public eye. I was irresponsible. I was experimenting. I was doing certain things that people do 10 times more of when they're in college."

When she first moved to Los Angeles, she says tabloids were her main source of news and that was "really scary and sad ... I would look up to those girls ... the Britneys and whatever. And I would be like, I want to be like that."

Looking back, the former child star says she wishes she had more "structure" in her life before hitting it big.

"I had structure, and then I lost all the structure in my life," she says. "I think a lot of it was because when I was doing my first slew of movies, it was very go-go, and I had a lot of responsibility, and I think just the second I didn't have [structure] anymore -- I was 18, 19 -- with a ton of money."

She lashes out at estranged father Michael. "The worst part of it is you turn around and you see your dad crying and normally you'd be, like, happy that your father's there," she says. "But then he has to go and do an interview right after."

She blames him for spreading lies about her. Contradicting what her dad has said, the actress swears, "I've never abused prescription drugs. I never have - never in my life. I have no desire to. That's not who I am. I've admitted to the things that I've done - to, you know, dabbling in certain things and trying things 'cause I was young and curious and thought it was like, O.K., 'cause other people were doing it and other people put it in front of me. And I see what happened in my life because of it."

Today, she says, "I want my career back. I know that I'm a damn good actress, and it's been my passion since I was a child, and I know that when I care about something, I put 100 percent and more into it."

Adds Lohan, "I want the respect that I had when I was doing great movies. And if that takes not going out to a club at night, then so be it. It's not fun anyway. I don't care. It's the same thing every time."

Lohan Stopped By Police
 
Lindsay Lohan's car was pulled over by police in Los Angeles on Friday night just days after she was allowed back on the road following a driving ban.

The Mean Girls star renewed her licence last Wednesday shortly after she completed a jail sentence and a stint in rehab for breaching her probation relating to a 2007 DUI arrest.

She was back behind the wheel within hours of regaining her paperwork, but on Friday night the actress was given a scare when her luxury sportscar was stopped by cops.

Lohan allegedly committed a minor motoring offence of failing to adhere to a stop sign and was let off with a warning, reports TMZ.com.