So it took my partner and I three days to watch Avatar Way of Water because it is so fucking God damn boring. I’m not sure I’ve seen a film so filled with cliches and boring tropes done hundreds of times before. It meanders along with nothing to grip you to the characters. Each being a dead weight archetype. See this is the problem that can happen with big Blockbusters but interestingly enough I saw a film today that didn’t fail at this.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. This is what makes me want to go see blockbusters. What James Gunn does here is put real weight behind characters. Even giving the Villain motivations without giving him a dumb tragic sympathetic back story. Some villains are irremediable and let them be that. Its glorious to really see a villain be evil. Give them just enough depth but don’t have them be boring with no real motivation as in James Cameron’s Avatar. Guardians vol 3 blew me away. I walked out of it on cloud 9. Its the right type of Blockbuster where it pushes your emotions to 11 while still giving you all the over the top thrills, think of Top Gun Maverick. I realize Xavier Dolan and James Gunn have something in common too. Very different filmmakers overall as Dolan is a Quebecian indy queer deeply dramatic dark strange filmmaker while Gunn is mostly doing comic adaptations for the screen for Marvel and DC respectively. One is huge at Cannes while the other is Huge with Comic Cons. You see how drastically different they seem but the more I think about it they fit very similar roles for me in my head. The first is the more trivial idea of them both using music that is so popular that usually when it used in film it garners eye rolls but somehow they make it palatable or even effecting. Dolan in his fantastic film Mommy uses ‘Wonderwall’ a song I usually hate to make me tear up while Gunn uses ‘Creep’ to somehow invest me into a story so deeply I’m glued for the rest of the runtime. How the fuck they pull this off I have no idea. I have in the last week watched 5 Dolan films and loved each while I’ve watched Guardians which was a comic breath of fresh air too. So maybe I’m just watching things too close together and see comparisons where maybe their isn’t as many but with the injection of The Way of Water in the mix I realize the comparisons are apt because of how fucking bad Avatar is as a film. The second more major comparisons is how they both build characters. They do it in the way of showing characters actions in the now as a response to past bullshit you may not fully know. this gives their characters nuance by not giving too much away but building them slowly. They are such Character driven directors that without them their films would never work seeing as plot is thin on purpose. The little details they litter these characters with is what makes them so real. The Guardians of the Galaxy films work Because not just he action but because of the fullness of the characters and their interactions with each other. Same goes for every Dolan film, how they characters treat and react to each other is bigger than the films plot which for me makes it so much more compelling. Their films hit such deep emotional levels because of that emotional interplay that the characters all intertwine with each other as we all do with everyone in our lives. Whether in a small house in Quebec of the great expanse of endless Space both are equally personal. They both have a keen eye for the true idea of film and the image speaking louder than words that’s why with both filmmakers the films looks grotesquely gorgeous. They have a strangeness to them that is injected in each of their work, it is never as simple as it seems, they push the weird which I adore. So overall this article is just a recommendation. A smaller deep Art boy wonder of Xavier Dolan and The grand Genius of the weird James Gunn. I say dive into both of their filmography some I recommend below.
Xavier Dolan James Gunn
Laurence Anyways Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 1
Mommy Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2
It’s Only the End of the World Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3
Heartbeats The Suicide Squad
Matthias & Maxime Peacemaker Series
