who needs originality, anyway?

after spending what felt like most of my life trying to create an ad campaign around a particular brand of antacids, i've come to wonder what's so great about originality, anyway. here i am, going through all possible scenarios of an antacid commercial, most of which include the two friends, one who's just eaten something that gives him/her heartburn and one who recommends this fantastic new antacid.

blech. can't we just draw on our vast knowledge of information that's already been seen, debated and eventually accepted? why can't we get away with conventionality?

take quentin tarantino. the man doesn't have an original bone in his body, but everyone's always talking about what an ingenue he is. he takes concepts, music, sometimes entire scenes from other movies. his movies are filled to the brim with references to other movies, and sometimes he even rehashes his own stuff, although most of that happens in the soundtracks.

from 'reservoir dogs' all the way to 'inglourious basterds,' tarantino's body of work reads like an amalgamation of every japanese action film known to man. if nothing else, you have to give him credit for finding the time to actually see all these movies he takes pieces from.

now, i'm not saying this is at all a bad thing. in fact, quite the opposite. he is a freaking genius, because even given all his remaking, rehashing and referencing, he's managed to convince us all of his originality. maybe the thing that cements tarantino's uniqueness is his ability to mash together a smattering of things we've already seen, combining them in a way we haven't. he did take the quintessential world war II movie and then change not just the plot, but the end of the war.

i have tremendous respect for tarantino's epic badassery. his movies are fantastically gory, and his concepts are always entertaining. his skill as a director is undeniable, especially his ability to make the unoriginal seem entirely new. if tarantino can do it, why can't i? find concepts and taglines from old campaigns and reuse them for different products... maybe even the same product, call it a throwback to retro style or something. seems easy enough, right? nope, because somehow there's no way i could pull it off because i'm not an arrogant, mildly creepy, 'heavily influenced' movie director.

all that being said, i'm still an advocate of originality. see, if you sit there and mull over the concept for long enough, creativity will eventually strike. thankfully, in this case, it did, and yours truly managed to knock that stupid antacid commercial out of the park at the eleventh hour, as always. isn't the final product better ten times out of ten if it's something entirely new, something you sat and thought about for however long, making your project something entirely your own and not just a knockoff of someone else's? it's like you feel more accomplished at the end of the day if you had to work for your idea.

take 'death at a funeral.' the original movie, a british black comedy, ranks pretty high on my list of favorite movies. it's laugh-out-loud funny, but at the same time it has elements of understated sarcasm and underplayed hilarity. there's a new version coming out soon, which might as well be the same movie, only made in america.

america most definitely got some things right, things mostly concentrated in the area of food, but as a fan of the original 'death at a funeral,' this movie looks like an unmitigated disaster. it stars chris rock, tracy morgan, martin lawrence et al, and is a line-for-line re-enactment of the original. if it were actually the same movie with different characters, i'm not sure i'd have the same issues with it, but despite the dialogue being nearly identical, the remake takes the perfect blend of comedy and turns it into two hours of over-exaggerated slapstick.

the proverbial problem with remakes is the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' mentality, and it goes the same for originality. while tarantino makes the 'borrowing' system work, i'd much rather sit around my apartment watching bad tv and mulling over the concept until a brilliant idea pops into my head. i love those few minutes after you've just had a stroke of brilliance, but aren't quite sure where to take it, so you think as fast as you can in order to cement your idea before it falls right back out of your head. if anything, it keeps things interesting.

so, to answer my own question: who needs originality? we all do.