Ten Things: Guardian of the Galaxy

Hey, remember when going to the movies in the summer was supposed to be fun?  Well, Marvel sure does, and they've decided to take the rest of us along for the ride with Guardians of the Galaxy.  It's actually quite remarkable what Marvel Studios has accomplished here; they've taken one of the most obscure and bizarre hero teams in the Marvel Universe and turned it into one of the best Marvel movies since The Avengers.  Heck, I'm ready to see it again right now, which I haven't done since Pacific Rim.  If you haven't seen it yet, drop what you're doing and go now.

If you have seen it, stick around and see ten things I didn't like about my favorite movie of the year so far:

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.

Ten Things: Pacific Rim

I'm not going to lie: Pacific Rim is easily my favorite movie so far this year, with disclaimer that I haven't seen Gravity yet and Thor: The Dark World and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug have yet to be released.  But even if Gravity turns out to be the best movie I see this year, Pacific Rim will still hold a special place in my heart.  Not only is it a Kaiju movie--and I love me some Kaiju movies--it's a Kaiju movie made with a big budget by Guillermo del Toro.  Plus, it's fun.  Indeed, Pacific Rim was easily the most fun I've had watching a movie since The Avengers.  If you don't already own it on Blu-ray, do so.

But Pacific Rim is by no means perfect, so here are ten things that I didn't like about it.

Ten Things: Star Trek Into Darkness

(For my inaugural post here at Impossible to Please, I thought it fitting to begin with an updated version of the Facebook status update that planted the first seed of an idea.)

I did not like Star Trek Into Darkness.  At all.  I could (and probably will) dedicate an entire blog post to why this movie is a failure and why it's a terrible omen for Star Wars Episode VII.  When I said as much on Facebook after seeing it, one of the first comments was how I don't like anything.  To prove that person wrong, I decided to come up with one thing that I liked about STID.  That one thing became five things, which ended up ballooning to ten things.  Soon I was listing ten good things in other movies I hated, plus ten bad things about movies I liked.  A few months later and that idea has blossomed into the blog you see here.