Please, Joseph Campbell has become like, the formula for a sucessful movie. It's all George Lucas's fault really. ;) Wish I had more time/money to go see movies.
I am reminded of what Neil Gaiman said about Joseph Campbell. He loves The Masks of God (a series of books I should acquire and read myself), but he read only a little bit of The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and decided that it was a book he didn't want to read, and didn't want any knowledge of. He couldn't quite deal with something that exposed the nuts and bolts of the craft so starkly.
I don't have much interest in reading that book either, for much the same reason, honestly. I know a lot about it (for instance, enough that the Harry Potter books are predictable to a ludicrous degree), but, like Mr. Gaiman, I don't wish to have the nuts and bolts of my craft laid so bare.
It's just a game I like to play with fiction. Lord Raglan's scale, Joseph Campbell, Tolkien's essay on fantasy--it's fascinating how certain tropes do come up again and again. But it amazes me how it repeatedly WORKS and doesn't feel tired or cliched every time. Most of it has to do with execution and character. There was nothing in this movie that hasn't been done before as a hero's quest--the boiled down elements--and yet it felt fresh.
The bits of the plot are often the same, but can it put them in an order that is actually surprising.
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I don't have much interest in reading that book either, for much the same reason, honestly. I know a lot about it (for instance, enough that the Harry Potter books are predictable to a ludicrous degree), but, like Mr. Gaiman, I don't wish to have the nuts and bolts of my craft laid so bare.
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The bits of the plot are often the same, but can it put them in an order that is actually surprising.
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