Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Next Day - A New Genre in Filmmaking
That's the name of a new movie coming out starring Anthony Edwards, Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, Patrick Stewart and a few cameo appearances by Bruce Willis, Sean Connery, Billy Zane even André Agassi and others. All the people in this movie, even the director and some of the crew, are bald.
It's basically about a secret agent who tries to deliver a serum able to grow a perfect head of hair on the head (when for years people have lived in a society where bald is seen as beautiful - even the women shave their heads). The serum is intended sleepers imbedded in the Middle East, so that agents can quickly fit in with the mustachioed Muslims that walk the streets...
His is a routine mission and no one pursues him or tries to prevent him from carrying out his mission, because having hair is no longer a priority, if anything, people are trying to get rid of it, wherever it may be. But his curiosity gets the better of him, and he injects some of the serum into himself. The result is he has to continue his life of subterfuge - he has other stuff going on, such as providing intelligence on terrorist activities (the terrorists have long hair and beards)and like all spies he has some dalliances going on a la Bond with women who prefer bald men...) and he has to do conduct himself as normal even though his hair is growing at an accelerated rate. His journey takes one through a new society that few will recognise. It is possible even to take away the spoof serum factor and allow the movie to take itself very seriously. It may produce a new genre! The world may actually feel it needs to enter a new fashion - one in which all the elements of bald fit perfectly:
extremism, activism, artiness, humanity, purity, passion, sexiness, spirituality, science fiction, vulnerability and sheer strength of muscle and mind.
Ok ok. I had this idea for a movie. You basically fill it with bald people. You make the people with hair stand out and be kind've noticeable, and occasionally make them feel like oddballs.
I have realised that even the word 'bald' has a negative stigma, and actors and musicians - some of them - allow that stigma to intimidate them. Maybe they don't have much of a choice, but I am think about hat wearer's like Bruce Willis and u2's The Edge, and people like Sean Connery and Billy Zane who always seem to have a full head of hair in movies but not in real life. I am not sure about guys like Nicholas Cage and Kevin Costner.
So I'd like to make a movie where you reverse that trend, where you actively and directly portray bald as cool. There are some really cool bald characters. Peter Garrett, Andre Agassi, Jean Marc Barr (although he was only cool in the Big Blue) and the somewhat diminished Sinead o' Conner. Demi Moore was very watchable in the otherwise forgettable Gi Jane, and remember Sigourney Weaver in Aliens Resurrection.
You here's a WHAT IF MOVIE where everyone in it is bald, and chic, and confidently cool, and there are a few cameo performances by exceptionally beautiful people (who are not bald) but who come across totally artificial and fake, and maybe even klutzy and dumb. It is sort of a one day world in which the stereotype that prevails gets turned on its head. It is the bald version, I guess, of that movie with Jack Black where he imagines his enormous girlfriend is really svelte. Shallow Hal. But make this movie far more serious, and far more of an attempt to be chic, but still subtly tongue in cheek, rather than just dumb fun and tongue in cheek. I'd like to see something like this make a real statement.
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