Since its premiere on the fall festival circuit, Danny Boyle’s new film Slumdog Millionaire has ridden a wave of ecstatic buzz, one which many believe the film will ride to numerous Oscar nominations. With his crowd-pleasing arthouse hit, it seems that Boyle has finally arrived for real in Hollywood, a full dozen years after his breakthrough films, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. However, it wasn’t supposed to take this long. In the wake of Trainspotting’s international success, Boyle was tapped by Fox to bring his directorial sensibility to America with his subsequent project A Life Less Ordinary, which paired Boyle’s favored leading man Ewan McGregor with hot Hollywood starlet Cameron Diaz. Life was the director’s take on the romantic comedy, and Boyle’s goal was to infuse the warm fuzzy genre with a liberal amount of mid-nineties post-Tarantino edge while simultaneously indulging the audience’s romantic urges.

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Three weeks ago, we paid tribute to Paul Newman, a fantastically decent and charitable movie star possessed of great taste, artistic integrity and that elusive hat-trick of looks, talent and charisma that elevated him to the status of beloved international icon and left the world a sadder place when he left it.

Newman’s passing (and, to some extent, his dressing) got us thinking about other Leading Men and Leading Ladies we loved, or at least admired, or who at the very least satisfied most of the basic requirements of stardom: unforgettable performances in memorable films, a uniquely fascinating persona and maybe even some crazy knee-wobbling sex appeal for good measure.

But in the midst of all our recent celebrity praising, we couldn’t help noticing the preponderance of past and present “stars” who could more accurately be described as black holes: a whole lotta nothing endowed with tremendous powers of suck...false matinee idols who never really earned their overpraised, overpaid stations in the pop culture firmament, or genuine icons who long ago squandered whatever legitimacy they once had, and now just bug the shit out of us.

Given the fleeting, fickle nature of fame and the contrarian curmudgeonliness of your friends here at the Screengrab, you may notice a few of the names we praised less than a fortnight hence are back this week as figures of scorn and ridicule...

...but hey, that’s show biz, kid, so let’s get ready to RUUUUUUMMBLE!!!!!!

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All Roger Ebert, in town for the Toronto International Film Festival, wanted to do was watch a movie.  (Whether or not the movie, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, was worth watching or not is still a matter of some debate, but advance word is pretty good.  Sure, that's what they told me about Trainspotting.)  Unfortunately, because of the way the man sitting in front of him was sitting, he wasn't able to see the subtitles, and, because recent bouts with cancer, he was also unable to speak.  So he simply tapped the guy on the shoulder and gestured for him to move over a bit.  In a perfect world, that would be the end of the story, and you certainly wouldn't be reading about it here.

Of course, in a perfect world, there would be no such thing as a the New York Post.  It so happened that the slouching dimwit in front of Ebert was their witless film critic, Lou Lumenick.  Lumenick responded to Ebert's requests first by yelling "Don't touch me!" at him, as if he were a bristly hobo taking up two seats on the LIRR, and then by spinning around and whacking the beloved Chicago critic with something (a rolled-up program, say some; a festival binder, say others).  Happily, the room was filled with hundreds of international journalists, and Lumenick was duly shamed as the story spread all over the internet, marking the first time since 1872 that a New York Post employee experienced the feeling of shame.

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One of the most appealing characters in Joel & Ethan Coen's brilliantly realized No Country for Old Men is Llewellyn Moss' young bride, Carla Jean, and the psychotic criminal Anton Chigurh's determination to hold her responsible for her husband's actions provides some of the movie's most tense and compelling moments.  So fully does actress Kelly Macdonald inhabit the role -- projecting youthful innocence, patience, confusion and understanding, and a near-perfect west Texas accent -- that it took me some time to realize that she is, in fact, that Kelly Macdonald, a Glaswegian actress whose own broad burr couldn't be further than the high-plains drawl of her charcter in the film.  Macdonald first came to fame after being cast, more or less on a fluke, as Ewan McGregor's ill-fated girlfriend in Trainspotting, a character as far removed from Carla Jean psychologically and emotionally as she is physically.

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