Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps & Lindsay Lohan

Another Friday and Gold's up, new home sales are flat at record lows, jobless claims were up (again) yesterday, and no, I'm not trying to get extra views by adding Lindsay to this title (wouldn't mind them though.)

It's just that, I was woken up this morning by a bunch of circling helicopters, which given past experience could only mean one thing - more certain than a blackberry alarm - Lindsay was heading back to court. I'm not sure what time she was slotted to appear, but the helicopters were hovering around 7 AM here in Hollywood.

I don't believe in jail except in the case of heinous crimes, those that can truly damage innocent people, so unlike most of the judgmental voices on the gossip sites (yes, I checked), I don't have a visceral feeling of wanting to see her behind bars so she'll 'learn her lesson.' I don't even care that Paris Hilton got busted for coke, and plead to a couple of misdemeanors, after frolicking on the Hawaiian shore, before sending lots of 'love' to her fans. There are multitudes of celebrities that do coke in Hollywood. But, I do care about the other people - the ones that can't afford $500 per hour lawyers, already facing life sans millions of dollars with far more limited future prospects, damaged further by a justice system that treats them much more harshly.

In other Hollywood news, I went to see a preview of Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps last night. Actually, my editor at the Daily Beast, Randall Lane, author of the engaging and brutally accurate book, The Zeroes, truly never sleeps, because at about 1AM his time, when I left the theatre in LA, he was putting the finishing touches on a piece, rounding up Wall Streeter opinions about the film, including mine. Read it.

Long story short - it was fun to match the characters to the real players - (only in the movies does a handsome hunk like Josh Brolin play a hybrid of Goldman CEO, Lloyd Blankfein and JPM Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon) - and the dramatized behind-the-scenes moments of the tension of 2008 (like some great NY Fed Scenes, where the hybrid Bear-Lehman firm run by Frank Lagella's character dies and the bailout begins).

Unfortunately, the film didn't reflect today's drama, as well as the original did of the 1980s - mostly due to the anguish between Shia LaBeouf's character (really? Shia? to follow-up Charlie Sheen's Bud Fox?) and Carey Mulligan's. That, and such an extensive spray of financial events and products that the plot struggled to connect their dots, rather than be their center. Michael Douglas, of course, was amazing. All in all, it's worth seeing, if only as a reminder of how far we haven't come - today's repercussion for the real toxic asset creating characters was a government bailout, back then - felonies and large fines. Maybe things have changed.