Sampling

Enthusio wanted to go see the kids' movie Hoodwinked last weekend, so he, the Mermaid and I went to see it. It was kind of tolerable. If you don't know the intricacies of its plot, it's a mystery about who stole the recipes of Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother. (Spoiler alert: it's the rabbit with Andy Dick's voice. Really, it's Andy Dick's voice. He and Jack from Will and Grace who voiced the evil cat in "Cats and Dogs" are separated at voice-birth.)

Sitting there watching this movie, though, it suddenly occurred to me that basically every significant aspect of the movie was ripped off from something else that I had seen, heard or read before. Using the story of Little Red Riding Hood as the basis for the movie was tolerable, given that fairy tales have been the basis for later stories forever. However, literally everything was ripped off from somewhere else. Most of the structure of the story was in a format where various characters told the inevitable police investigator what they saw, a technique that the movie Rashomon (which I have ever seen, but have heard about) apparently pioneered. In recent years, that technique has been used at least by the excellent TV show "Boomtown" (unfairly cancelled, damn you, NBC). The police investigator frog essentially was Hercule Poirot, down to the little mustache. The wolf was an investigative journalist who was clearly supposed to be Fletch (there was even a scene with him playing basketball in a big Afro). Fletch's photographer was an over-caffinated squirrel who was clearly based on Scrat from Ice Age. Grandma was into extreme sports and even was featured slamming some kind of soda while skydiving, an apparent homage to Mountain Dew commercials. (Homages to Mountain Dew commercials, think about that for a minute.) While being chased by a Schwarzneggerian bad guy on skiis, Grandma busted out with a variety of moves captured in slow motion a la "The Matrix." The woodsman was a struggling Method actor who actually sold Schnitzel sticks and was trying to motivate himself to get a woodsman part by chopping down a tree while reading "Chopping for Dummies." Spoiler alert (like you care at this point): the evil rabbit bore more than a little resemblance to the drawings of the evil rabbits in "Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse." Red Riding Hood was put into physical danger by being tied up in an aerial tram with lit explosives in a kind of cross between a scene from "Moonraker" and "Speed" (she even kind of looked like Sandra Bullock). Otherwise, Red Riding Hood was just pretty dull.

I was just floored. The whole movie was a collection of samples from other things, all mixed together and spit out in a form to appeal to kids. (This was after sitting through pre-movie ads for nachos that were based on Lord of the Rings. Apparently, the flavor of some nacho cheeses is so powerful only Frodo Chip can resist being turned evil buy them. I didn't buy the basic premise: I hate nacho cheese and do not believe that I would be turned evil by it.) There's about $35 I'm never going to get back.

I guess that we've been headed toward this sort of thing ever since Sugarhill Gang hit it big with "Rapper's Delight" in which they sampled Chic's "Good Times." Lots and lots of rap music is based on samples, of course, and I enjoy quite a bit of that. I mean, it doesn't get much better than De La Soul's "Eye Know," which is based on a sample from Steely Dan's "Peg (I Know I Love You Better)." Both the juxtaposition and the result is entertaining. As rap has gotten more influential, this ethos of sampling has slowly made its way into all kinds of media and lots of times that's enjoyable (which is kind of ironic because rap has gotten less sample-dependent as other artists have realized that rappers are making big money using samples and accordingly the price for using a sample has gone way up). It really crossed over into kids' movies with "Shrek," I guess. I'll admit I thought it was pretty funny when Princess Fiona went all Matrix on Robin Hood and his men.

But we have gotten to the point in a lot of entertainment where the sampling is completely overwhelming any originality. Music reached that point no later than when Sean Coombs (Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy, Diddy, Iddy Bitty Wittle Puffy) basically just changed the words of the Police's "Every Breath You Take" to do his euology of Biggie Smalls/Notorious B.I.G. "I'll Be Missing You." The song was kind of like something that Weird Al Yankovic would do, except not funny (which is the point of Weird Al's stuff). All of the originality came from the Police.

This sampling is really bad, of course, when old TV shows are remade into movies. Very, very rarely, the movie is good (The Fugitive, anything, anything, anything else? Bueller, Bueller? Sorry, that's a sample, right there). Very, very often, the movie stinks (Flintstones, anyone?).

But Hoodwinked struck me as something new and bad. It's a whole movie that is just basically little bits of other stuff. It's like a collage of stuff cut from magazines run at 24 frames a second. Come on, people, make something new.