Episode 1352: Only Three Films!

So it turned out that there weren't too many films I wanted to see on this flight. Only saw three, starting with This Means War, in which I thought Reese Witherspoon was pretty superfluous. Frankly, the Tom Hardy/Chris Pine bromance was very USA Network, i.e. funny enough to carry the whole show on its own. (Apparently, quite a few film critics would disagree with me though.) I approved of Hardy being allowed to keep his accent, as well as both actors playing against their real-life images. This film was obviously never going to catapult either guy to Hollywood superstardom (I guess that would be The Dark Knight Rises for Hardy and the rebooted Star Trek franchise for Pine), but it does show that they can do comedy repartée. Then I saw How To Train Your Dragon, which I loved and is now being developed into a trilogy, per Hollywood's penchant for spinning out moneymakers. Also watched Liar Game: Reborn, a mishmash of game theory and group psychology, producing outcomes that didn't always make sense, at least not until the later flashback sequences explaining them. I was sort of expecting something more gruesome, like the Saw franchise. Sure, a crippling monetary penalty is something you'd want to avoid, but it's hardly life-threatening, and the show seemed so desperately to want to portray the whole Liar Game as being thus. Maybe I needed to watch the earlier parts of the franchise, which consists of two TV series and one film?