One Off

There's seems to be an excessive amount of advertising on the Net at the moment for weight loss pills. Is someone trying to tell me something?
And, apropos of the above not at all, I've sometimes wondered if actors should only ever make one movie. When you see a movie where the main actor is someone totally unfamiliar to you (as Ryan Gosling was to me in Lars and the Real Girl) you take that person as more real and their acting approach as perfectly right for the character. I saw a movie recently called The Grocer's Son, and because the actor (Nicolas Cazalé) was quite new to me, I took it on trust that this person and the character were the 'same.' Does that make sense?
When we see Julia Roberts and Clive Owen (and a bunch of other familiar faces) strutting their stuff in Duplicity, they bring a pile of baggage from other movies, and get between you and the character.
Of course it's plain uneconomic to have new actors for every new movie - even I realise that - and I can't see that actors will think it's a good idea. But it reminds me of something from my childhood. I saw a movie when I was a kid in which, at the end, there was an underwater fight: two guys with knives attacking each other. One got stabbed, of course, and (as a child) it seemed to me that moviemakers must go through an awful lot of actors if they killed them off so often in the movies...