Fan Fare

Dina Lohan — don’t blame Lindsay. Or me.

According to Dina Lohan,  there’s nothing wrong with her daughter that can’t be blamed on the media, the paparazzi, and the Beverly Hills judge who sent Lindsay to jail, and then ordered her to drug and alcohol rehab for 90 days.

No matter that it’s the fourth stint in rehab for Lohan, 24,  since 2007, when the “Mean Girls” star said in a statement that her life had become  “completely unmanageable” because she was addicted to alcohol and drugs.

In a terse and defensive TV interview on Friday, mom Dina appeared to have no regrets and took no responsibility for the rapid and alarming downfall of her daughter, who came alone to Hollywood at the age of 19 to live, work, and party all night long.

“I had to let her go and let her live and fall and fail and survive. Without failure, there’s no success,” she said. “I was there in close proximity, but you can’t make your child not go out and go to a club and not get behind the wheel of a car. I certainly don’t condone any of that behavior,” Dina Lohan said,  adding that it was part of a parent’s responsibility to give their children freedom.

She blamed the media for “propaganda” that painted Lindsay and her lifestyle in a bad light, and the Beverly Hills judge for playing “hardball” with her daughter.

In fact, everyone is to blame for what had happened to Lindsay, apart from Lindsay herself. And Dina.

Roman Polanski — winners and losers

Europeans celebrated and  stunned U.S. officials vowed to try again to extradite director Roman Polanski if they ever find a “cooperative” jurisdiction in the future.

But where was Hollywood on Monday when Polanski finally won his freedom in Switzerland and avoided a showdown in California over the rape of a 13 year-old girl in 1977? Largely silent,  despite having awarded Polanski a best director Oscar for his searing 2002  movie “The Pianist”,  set in a World War Two ghetto.

For all the criticism in parts of the media of so-called Hollywood liberals,  U.S. supporters of Polanski were hardly standing up to be counted on the day Switzerland rejected a U.S. bid to extradite the film director to face sentencing over having unlawful sex with a minor more than 30 years ago.

In Europe on the other hand, where Polanski has lived, made movies, and carried on as a living film legend, politicians and artists  issued warm statements welcoming his return to the creative community and noting Polanski’s painful personal history as a man who escaped the Holocaust, only to see his pregnant wife murdered by followers of Charles Manson in 1969.

But over the pond,  groups representing sex abuse victims suggested that Polanski was a child predator who had used money and legal loopholes to get away with a heinous crime.  E! Online meanwhile made a Lindsay Lohan connection (Lohan gets a 90 days jail sentence for missing out on alcohol rehab classes, while convicted sex offender Polanski is a free man).

And at the Los Angeles Times,  journalist Patrick Goldstein surmised that the case highlighted a cultural divide between puritan Americans, and French and Italian leaders  “who keep electing guys who seem more infatuated with young women than even (Playboy founder) Hugh Hefner.”

Meanwhile, the wishes of Samantha Geimer, the woman at the center of it all who is now in her 40s, have repeatedly been over-ruled.  Drop it, she has pleaded, arguing that she is victimized again and again each time the  case is back in the news.

Update: Lindsay Lohan. Did judge see that finger?

(Note: Strong language in picture at bottom)

She said she was a changed woman. She pleaded for forgiveness. She cried before a judge. But on her middle finger nail she had painted an expletive. Was it a message to the judge? To the prosecutor? To the media? Regardless, when the gavel came down in the courtroom of Beverly Hills Superior Court Judge Marsha Revel, Lindsay Lohan was headed for jail.

The “Mean Girls” actress on Tuesday was sentenced to 90 days in jail — three 30-day terms, served consecutively — for each of two drunken driving charges and one reckless driving charge. (Read the story here) .

The charges stem from two arrests in 2007 in which Lohan was caught driving while drunk and possessing cocaine.  In the roughly three years since, Lohan has seen her acting career fall into a disarray and her attempt to start a fashion line founder.

In recent celebrity tabloid reports, she is still depicted as partying hard. She missed one court appearance in May when she was at the Cannes film festival and blamed a stolen passport on her inability to get back to the United States. Her court-ordered alcohol monitoring bracelet sounded an alarm when she was at a party following the MTV Movie Awards. As the saying goes, where there’s smoke…

Yet, in court, Lohan’s attorney argued that if you looked at her overall behavior, she had nearly completed everything the judge had ordered her to do.  She paid the fines she was supposed to pay, she did spend time in jail as ordered previously, she completed a 90-day in patient drug rehab program, and by July 15, she would have made up for all the missed classes and done everything Judge Revel ordered her to do. She only needed 9 more days.

In the end, Judge Revel sentenced her to jail for missing seven alcohol education classes over a 27-week period.

Lindsay Lohan’s birthday bash

Lindsay Lohan apparently got more than she bargained for while out clubbing early on her 24th birthday.

” A waitress just hit me — punched me for no reason,” Lohan said in a Twitter message shortly after midnight.

Lohan, complete with her alcohol-monitoring anklet, was photographed by paparazzi shortly after leaving the LA club but had no apparent injuries and no elaboration on what happened.

The only explanation forthcoming – from unidentified sources — was that the “Mean Girls” actress was hanging out at the club with reality TV personality Doug Reinhardt and the waitress took exception.

To make matters worse, Lohan then moved on to another club, only to find the same angry waitress was there also.

“Lohan showed up and cried because the waitress was there as well,” another “insider” told Us magazine.  “Some birthday.”

(Gosh. Who knew LA waitresses had such busy schedules? And no, we don’t know if the waitress was working or partying herself)

Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan. Double standards?

Two Hollywood stars.  Two different stories.

1) Former child star turns wild child, convicted of drunken driving, goes into rehab a few times, parties ’round the clock, gets dumped from at least one movie, plans role as porn queen — and becomes laughing stock of the celebrity media.

2) Middle-aged actor, three times married, plays raunchy womanizer, couple of stints in rehab, former client of notorious Hollywood Madam,  pulls knife on wife during drunken Christmas Day argument  –  and almost doubles salary to become highest-paid actor on TV.

Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen have both found themselves in a whole lot of  trouble this year.  But  while Lindsay’s star has long since fallen, Charlie has emerged virtually unscathed in the eyes of the public, the media and the industry.

Sheen is expected to be sentenced to 30 days in jail on Monday as a result of his violent and drunken Christmas Day fight in Aspen with third wife Brooke Mueller.  But his latest violence-related dust-up with the law has had no effect on audiences for his TV show “Two and a Half Men”, which remains the top-rated comedy on U.S. television.

After negotiating a new contract in May that reportedly almost doubled his pay to about $1.8 million — per episode — for the next two years,  Sheen is now, by far, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood.

Lohan, Dreyfus and two tall Hollywood tales?

From the wacky world of Hollywood comes two larger than life stories — but  only one of them may be true.

1) Double Emmy winner,  actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus of “Seinfeld” and “The New Adventures of Old Christine”  fame  gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Grumpy “Seinfeld” creator Larry David was among those turning out to celebrate with her.  But there’s one problem.  Just before the ceremony,  organizers realize they have spelled one of Julia’s names wrong  (Whoops!) and scramble to fix it before she arrives.

2) Lindsay Lohan, erstwhile child star turned wild child,  has been cast to play porn queen Linda Lovelace in a planned biopic about the star of the infamous 1972 movie “Deep Throat.”   That’s certainly a headline for the 23 year-old actress who has been making more news off screen than on it for the past three years.  And it seems to fit with a recent week of hair-raising exploits from the LiLo camp, including a racy gunplay photoshoot and Daddy’s bid to put the brakes on Lindsay’s  life in the fast lane.

So which tale is too good to be true, and which has the ring of truth?

1) It’s true — the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce left out the hyphen and the “O” in Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s name and sent workers to chisel out the “Luis”  and replace it with a temporary Louis-. The Huffington Post has the tell-tale evidence

2) May be true (but for all those who loved “Parent Trap” and laughed at “Mean Girls”, we hope not).  Depends which of the several executive producers of the forthcoming biopic, or which of Lohan’s un-named “friends” you believe.  We’re planning on waiting until an official announcement, said to be forthcoming at the Cannes film festival next week, before losing all hope. Then again,  Lindsay did play a stripper in the 2007  low-budget thriller “I Know Who Killed Me”   — and won a Razzie for worst actress. We’re just saying….

Lindsay Lohan in trouble, again?

We have to admit, we were sorry to read these stories. In the past week, celebrity news Web site TMZ has run several items about Lindsay Lohan returning to substance abuse. Their latest report is here, and it deals with Los Angeles police who help protect Lohan from the paparazzi. TMZ cites unnamed “cops” as saying that they have become increasingly concerned about Lohan’s “erratic behavior” which has grown progressively worse. This follows other reports, here and here, about Lohan’s supposed substance abuse and friends being concerned for her safety.

We have no idea if Lindsay is having trouble with drugs and alcohol, again, because we don’t hang out with her and her Hollywood club kid friends. (Her publicist  did not respond to the reports on Monday) .

But we do know that she has had her share of troubles in the past. You can read two old reports here and here. We also know that she had talent as an actress, but her ability to stretch that talent seemed to have stopped after 2006′s “A Prairie Home Companion” and “Bobby,” made when Lindsay was still a teenager and before she began landing in rehab.

Who really knows what Lindsay’s problems are or how to fix them. Will more time in rehab work?  Should she get out of Hollywood? Does she need new friends? Where’s her family? All good questions. We only hope Lindsay has some good answers and, if in fact she needs to, gets straightened out.

Lindsay Lohan = Oprah, Madonna?

Umm. No. — at least according to a poll by celebrity market researcher E-Poll.

Lohan — former Disney child star, turned member of the “Mean Girls,” then media sensation, before plunging into alcohol and drug abuse and going to rehab, from which she emerged to a troubled acting career and then flopped in the world of fashion, all before she turns 24 years old this year  — has sued E*Trade Financial Corp, seeking $100 million for an advertisement that Lohan claims wrongly uses her “likeness, name, characterization, and personality” without permission, violating her right of privacy. The ad involves toddlers. Read that story here.

Importantly, the ad uses only a first name, Lindsay, and of course there are millions of Lindsay’s in the world. Still, a lawyer for Lohan told the New York Post that the Hollywood actress has the same “single-name” recognition as celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Madonna. Really?

E-Poll, which makes a business out of asking questions like these and selling that information to companies looking for details about celebrity and pop culture, has come up with some different results. E-Poll recently asked a similar question of people and here’s what it found. In the name awareness category, Lindsay Lohan had a 77 percent rating to Oprah Winfrey’s 89 percent and Madonna’s 91 percent. Not bad, Lindsay LOHAN, but not quite the same — and not on a single name. E-Poll, by the way, is in no way affiliated with E*Trade. The two companies just share a first letter. (Hey, maybe they should sue each other).

Lindsay Lohan sues over baby look-alike E*Trade ad

Lindsay Lohan has sued E*Trade Financial for $100 million, saying a “milkaholic” baby girl who appeared in a recent commercial was modeled after her. You can read the story here.

Watch the video on YouTube below and judge for yourself.

Lindsay Lohan speaks with her finger — no not that one

Actress Lindsay Lohan appeared before a judge on Friday to explain why she had not regularly attended her alcohol education program. LiLo was mostly quiet, letting her attorney do the talking, but a photo from the hearing shows she had something to say with her index finger.

The word, “Shhh…” was tattooed on the digit. It’s been there for awhile, but this photo from the courtroom shows how the tattoo can add drama to even the most mundane of gestures.

Perhaps in a case like this one, where LiLo is dealing with the aftermath of a pair of drunken driving arrests, the actress would like everyone to follow her tattoo’s lead and hush up about the case.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Marsha Revel no doubt had the media scrutiny of LiLo in mind when she told the actress, “Your life is followed — it’s not as if you can just hide out.”

LiLo’s appearance in the Beverly Hills courtroom came after paparazzi photographers spent the morning pressed against the windows outside, waiting for a chance to take shots of her going through the security entrance.

The hearing was delayed more than an hour as the courtroom waited for LiLo to show up. During that time, Revel showed herself to be quite an entertaining judge, and got the reporters tittering by pulling out a giant, 4-foot gavel and chatting about “Balloon Boy” , the reality show “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” and the time a baseball landed in her lap at Dodger Stadium.

When she walked into the courtoom, LiLo was wearing sunglasses and holding hands with her attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley. During the hearing, Holley explained to the judge that LiLo had fallen behind on her alcohol education program because she had several projects going. LiLo these days is spending her time narrating a BBC documentary about human smuggling, recording an album for Universal Music Group and overseeing her fashion line, Holley said.