The Daily Beast has an extensive piece up on Nicolas Cage's financial ruin and how although he's pointing fingers and blaming his financial advisers for the fact that he's a broke-ass bitch, it's really all his fault due to his compulsive spending habits. Hey, a European castle isn't gonna buy itself you know.

Cage's appetite was extreme even for Hollywood, with a decade-plus shopping spree that saw him snapping up houses, motorcycles, a jet, yachts, vintage and new cars, expensive watches, meteorites, dinosaur skulls, an enormous pet collection, massive amounts of jewelry for the women in his life, group vacations for his entire entourage, and on and on and on. "He lived like a sheik," says one person who's known him for several years. "Spent money like it was water," says another. (Source)

I always thought Nicolas Cage displayed the same sense of judgment in choosing movie roles as my dog does when deciding what to eat out of the trashcan. Sure, it might be half of an uneaten sandwich (Adaptation) or it might be the plastic wrap that the sandwich came in. (Wicker Man, National Treasure 1 & 2, Ghost Rider, et al.) But I guess when you figure that Ghost Rider 2 is probably just like, a down payment on an actual recovered alien spacecraft -- it doesn't seem so stupid now, does it? When the plot of one of his dumb apocalyptic movies comes to life, we're not gonna be the ones laughing from the safety of extraterrestrial technology.