You Are Not Allowed To Be In Other Movies. Because I Said So.

I apparently have a new reader, which is very exciting, because I've been maintaining my readership of three people for a year and a half now, and it's always fun to bring random people into my web of intrigue slash greatness. At any rate, reelfanatic commented on my last post, stating that Richard Farnsworth may have been in a David Lynch movie. Here's the thing. There are certain actors that you always intrinsically identify with one movie, either because you've never seen one of their other movies or because one of their roles made such a huge, hardcore impression that you couldn't separate their character in that one movie from anything else they ever did.
Such is the case with Mr. Farnsworth. I'm pretty sure I've never seen him in anything besides Anne of Green Gables, so if I stumbled upon a film where he was doing something other than driving Anne back to Green Gables in his wagon and tilling the fields on Prince Edward Island, I would lose my shit. So I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to deconstruct this image of Richard Farnsworth, but part of that is because I've been anti-David Lynch since he decided to do a movie showcasing Naomi Watts' nipples, and there are few things that I am more against in this world than her Aussie areolae.

See the buttons on her dress? Her nips are literally 10 times the size of them. Literally.

Since there is nothing to do at work, I can spend all day making a delightful list of actors that I am morally compelled to never see in multiple movies, for fear of ruining my image of them.

1. Barbara Hershey (Hillary Whitney) - Beaches

This is the part of the movie that really starts to set me off. Okay, I actually start crying about 10 minutes before this, when Hillary goes to the library to look up cardio myopathy and starts reading, finds out she's going to die, and starts looking around the library with teary eyes. But I usually start full-on bawling at this point, when Hillary beats Bette at gin, and Bette gets up to make lunch for Hillary's daughter (because Hillary's dying and is too weak at this point to do anything) and says, "I know everything there is to know about you, and my memory is long, my memory is very long." She walks away and Barbara Hershey takes off her glasses and you can see how dark the area around her eyes has gotten, and she murmurs, "I'm counting on it." God. Seriously. I could go on for eons about how amazing this movie is.

Now, Barbara Hershey has been in a TON of movies, including The Last Temptation of Christ, The Portrait of a Lady (which I need to see because I endured a hellish month getting through that book and I should be quasi-rewarded for my troubles) and Hannah and her Sisters. I've only seen two of her non-Beaches movies - Swing Kids, in which she has a putrid German accent and is Robert Sean Leonard's mother in Nazi Germany, and The Natural, which I turned off about 25% of the way through because it was the dumbest shit I had seen since The Mummy. And it basically destroyed my faith in Robert Redford, because I hadn't been aware of the idea that he could make a bad movie. That was before I saw Indecent Proposal. You know. When people thought Demi Moore was a legitimate actress.
I just can't see Barbara Hershey as anything other than Hillary, and that's more about the movie than her, because I didn't think she was particularly amazing in it. Although it may have something to do with the fact that the two other characters I've seen her play were much more simplistic than Hillary. I don't know - it's difficult to think rationally when Beaches is involved.

2. Victor Garber (Thomas Andrews) - Titanic

Victor Garber has suffered the fate that many actors who are relegated to supporting roles are subject to. Since he's not well-known in terms of name recognition, he's usually identified as "The Pervert Guy Who Molested Reese in Legally Blonde" or "That Guy From 'Alias'" or "The Weird Guy From The New Hit Fox Series 'Justice.'" For me, he will always be the Scotsman from Titanic who designed the unsinkable ship and spent the second half of the movie sulking/brooding Ryan Atwood style as Kate and Leo kept getting on and off the ship, going from deck to deck and skirting death until Leo finally developed icicles under his nose and Kate dropped him into the Atlantic. The only thing that could have made Titanic better was if his character made out with Kathy Bates.

The Unsinkable Molly Brown + Victor Garber = Love.

3. Bob Hoskins (Eddie Valient) - Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

I'm platonically in love with Bob Hoskins. I think he has the best nose in the history of humanity, and his natural cockney accent is sex. He's sort of an anamoly on this list in that I've actually seen quite a few of his movies, including Mermaids with Winona Ryder, which has been shown three times in the five-year history of the Wino Marathon. I'm also pretty sure he was gypped of Oscar gold for Unleashed with Jet Li, but that's not an argument I even have the slightest chance of winning. Sigh.

That said, between the ages of 5 and 10, I probably saw this movie more than Terminator 2 or Land Before Time. I have no idea why I was all about Roger Rabbit, especially since I couldn't emotionally handle the last 15 minutes of it when Judge Doom's eyes bulged out ala Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall and he kept throwing cartoon blades at Bob Hoskins. Shiver. His raspy American accent (very underrated in the age of Jude Law accent butchery) is engrained into my psyche, and I was under the mistaken impression for about 10 years that the flask he kept swigging was Ginger Ale. Live and learn.

"Bob Hoskins? Never heard of him."

4. Kevin Bacon (Sean Nokes and Walter)- Sleepers and The Woodsman.

I'm pretty sure there is something legit wrong with Kevin Bacon. He couldn't content himself with fighting off mutant worm things in the desert in Tremors, so he decides to take a stab at being typecast as a child molestor. Everyone is entitled to make one movie where they play a rapist or a child molestor, but when you do it more than once dot dot dot. It doesn't help that Kevin Bacon seems kind of creepy to begin with, even in protagonist roles like Footloose or Apollo 13 - I thought he was going to do something dirty to Tom Hanks once they got on the other side of the moon. But he's not helping the situation when he commands a 13-year-old Brad Renfro to suck him off and then ass-rapes some other boys for two hours. He could make a movie where he just pets bunny rabbits for three hours, but the entire time, I would just be thinking, "When is he going to molest them?"

"Keep me away from Kevin Bacon!"

5. James Cromwell (Arthur Hoggett) - Babe

In an homage to Emma's undying love for anthropomorphic goodness (stay tuned for an as-yet uncompleted post dedicated to anthropomorphic bears, including Paddington <3), James Cromwell is basically the only character in this movie who's not a talking animal. I LOVE when talking animals outnumber talking humans. I cannot emphasize that enough. See Bound, Homeward. What is absolutely genius about this is that James Cromwell realized as soon as he stepped onto the set, "Okay, I can't out-act that pig or sheepdog. I'll just subtley stay in the background and command my talent from there." Totally pays off. He was shirked from Oscar goodness when Kevin Spacey played a pseudo gimp in the Usual Suspects. Bah!

As with several of his predecessors on this list, James Cromwell benefits from me not having seen a lot of his other work. However, he IS in an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that I've seen about 25 times - Eraser, where he blows his brains out within the first 10 minutes of the movie, I suspect because he had to share a scene with Vanessa Williams, but we'll never truly know.

Arnold Schwarzenegger never makes out with black girls in his movies - he didn't neck Rae Dawn Chong in Commando either. But he's not averse to sucking face with the Hispanic population. Ask Maria Conchita Alonso, who plays Winona's father's hooker in House of the Spirits. Sometimes I love what I know.

The "Untitled Dakota Fanning Project" is coming out in two weeks. And I'm buying tickets, like, now.
"You're going to see the Dakota Fanning rape movie before you see The Queen?" - Alana.