I Love It, But It Sucks: Legend of the Guardians

So The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug has come and gone, and I've had a good month or so to collect my thoughts on the matter.  Unfortunately, my thoughts on DoS so closely mirror my thoughts on the previous installment that going over them again would feel redundant.  In a nutshell, DoS is bloated and poorly paced, with a climax that so thoroughly breaks the film that it merits its own analysis once it comes out on Blu-ray.

However, if the Hobbit films have taught us anything over the last two years, it is to appreciate brevity and a solid pace when we can find it in the age Epic Cinema.  Yet brevity can lead to failure just as easily as bloat, as evidenced by 2010's Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole.

Ten Things: Thor: The Dark World

I'm just going to put this out there: Thor is probably my favorite Marvel superhero.  Thor and his supporting cast bring so much of what I love in good superhero stories: high adventure, whimsey, conflicted villains and high-stakes conflicts with a healthy dose of high fantasy strangeness.  Basically, everyone is larger than life and they are constantly dealing with weird and crazy shit.  And it all works, because we're dealing with Norse gods and nothing that modern writers can come up with will ever be as strange as the actual myths.

This love of Thor (and Tom Hiddleston's Loki) is probably why I thoroughly enjoyed the original Thor film, even though it is objectively in the lower-tier of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  The sequel, Thor: The Dark World, thankfully requires no qualifiers or justifications to explain my enjoyment.  This movie is fun, joyful, and above all funny in a way that hasn't been seen since Captain America and the first Iron Man.  While it takes a while to get going, the second and third acts more than make up for a slow start.  If you get the chance, you should definitely check this movie out.

Now here are ten things that I didn't like.

I Love It, But It Sucks: The Hobbit

Before I start, I want to be absolutely clear: I really do love The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  Seriously.  While I don't think that it was one of the best movies to come out last year, it was one that I highly enjoyed--which is more than can be said of a lot of things I've seen in the last year or so.

But as much as I like The Hobbit, it is not a good movie.  At all.  In fact, it's easily the worst of the four Tolkien adaptations by director Peter Jackson.  Not even the padded, plodding theatrical cut of Two Towers can really hold a candle to The Hobbit at its worst.  Which is a shame, because there is a good movie hiding in The Hobbit, and it features some of the best scenes in the entire franchise.

I know that I'm going to get some blow back from some friends for dissecting The Hobbit, but I think that understanding why this movie fails might help us understand some of what is wrong with Hollywood movies today.