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New Pics From 'Guardians Of The Galaxy' Plus Joss Whedon Compares 'The Dark Knight' To 'The Godfather'

"I’ve never played a character like Ronan before,"

Lee Pace recently told Yahoo Movies about his turn in "Guardians Of The Galaxy." I like a bombastic villain, and that’s what I had a good time doing. It was the most fun playing this character…He’s just so evil. At first when I started working on him, I was thinking, \'We’ve seen so many great performances of villains by very talented actors in superhero movies. I’ve got to find something relatable about this guy.\' But the more I played him, the more fun I had with just being evil. [Laughs] Evil, evil, evil. He’s an alien – there’s no kind of human rules. There’s nothing to relate to, actually. It just became, like, the more dark I could conceive of him, the more I understood him."

And that will be an interesting bit of shading to James Gunn\'s upcoming Marvel which seems to blend his ability for quirky comedy with an epic space adventure. The studio has dropped a handful of new stills to give you a closer look at the batch of oddball characters populating this world. From Rocket Raccoon to Groot to Drax, you get new looks at them all, while Peter Quill represents the sole human, and we also get a couple of shots of The Milano too. Will it be too weird for mainstream audiences or is that exactly the selling point?

Perhaps that\'s a question to pose to Joss Whedon, the current guru of the Marvel-verse, who has an interesting take on Christopher Nolan\'s realistic (and influential) take on superhero movies. "Now, I watched \'The Dark Knight\' and I thought of that as riffing on the genre," he told Huffington Post. "That was a superhero movie as \'The Godfather.\' And I was like, \'But I just still want to see a superhero movie!\' We had just gotten the technology to make it awesome, and I wasn\'t ready to be post-modern about it yet." 

However, that glee comes with limits. After laying waste to an entire city in "The Avengers," don\'t expect the same in the sequel.  "People have made it very clear that they are fed up with movies where entire cities are destroyed, and then we celebrate. I try to make my superhero movies as if there\'s either never been one or there\'s only ever been them," he said. "I work with the idea that it\'s just a natural way for people to be, so that you still make a movie about people."

So, will ticket buyers be down with a raccoon and tree for their heroes? Find out on August 1st.

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Well, I hate to sound fan-boyish and I love Joss Whedon when he is in his element (FireFly, Much ado about nothing) but The Dark Knight could wipe the floor with Avengers and still get its hands dirty. Avengers was a good one time watch, with great CGI action and good dialogue between characters. However it was no better than a sitcom with unlimited budget, and it had its fair share of misfires. I found the whole notion of superheroes quipping funny one liners amidst mass destruction of a metropolis completely disconcerting and off tone. At least Man of Steel showed the effects of a city's destruction. Avengers played it like "Tony Stark quip, Captain America quip, Black widow's butt, Hulk is cool". The story - though packaged neatly and in a fun manner - made no sense, and there was not one performance that you would remember after the end credits rolled (except to some extent - Tom Hiddleston's).

It was a nice movie - warts and all. But it was not "the great superhero movie" that Joss Whedon wanted to make.

I will be damned if I can find a single reason to speak of TDK - which is probably the best mainstream movie to come out in the last 5 years - and Avengers - which is a just another summer tentpole - in the same breath.

Oops: The Dark Knight came out 6 years ago.

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