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In a remote roadhouse on a rural back road, the young couple (Laura Ramsey, Luke Evans), towing all their worldly possessions in a trailer for their cross-country move, are just settling in for dinner when the thugs arrive. And they’re accosted.
“We don’t want any trouble.”
When has that line ever dissuaded anyone from doing their worst? Never.
What the couple doesn’t know, but we do, is that these five backwoods Goths have just botched a simple burglary, and had to slaughter a family that interrupted the heist. And no matter what their brutish leader (Lee Tergesen) says, no matter what steps the waitress (Lindsey Shaw) takes to intervene, there’s no defusing hothead Flynn (Derek Magyar).
“Pretty. Young. Just the way I like’em,” he says to Betty, the woman.
“Don’t,” she says, staring down her beau (Evans).
“Don’t,” Flynn adds. “You don’t look like the type.”
Oh, but he is. It’s only when the five have nabbed the pair that they find that out, ransacking their car, discovering another woman (Adelaide Clemens) hidden there. And it’s only when the blood spatters and the screams peal into the long, dark night that we figure out why this is titled “No One Lives.”
“Please tell me he’s dead,” the hostage blurts out to the killers who have freed her.
Negative.
“He doesn’t have a name,” she rages. “He’s going to come and kill you all.”
Ryûhei Kitamura (“The Midnight Meat Train”), working from a first-time writer David Cohen script, wrings a few jolts and some mordant laughs out of this “Last House on the Left” variation of an overly familiar formula.
“No One Lives” has to give away its biggest, best secret (the killers have messed with the wrong guy) far too early for its own good. The victims may be brave, but their response to this turnabout doesn’t make them put on their thuggish thinking caps. That robs the picture of suspense, though the odd moment of compassion kicks in, making us fear for this or that character’s fate.
Kitamura and Cohen try to finesse these gaping holes in the picture by giving their serial killer a sick sense of humor to go with his twisted “hobby.”
“I don’t lack emotion,” he complains, bickering with Betty. “I just process it differently.”
Evans (“Clash of the Titans,” “The Hobbit”) is no “Dexter,” but he handles the rare wry moments well, even covered in goo and gore. Clemens (“Silent Hill: Revelation”) lets us see the desperate wheels turning as Emma, the hostage, gives up on warning her liberators and starts computing her odds.
“My best hope of escape is while he’s killing the whole bunch of you.”
Her best hope, and ours, is that the title’s a lie. But with every scene, every glower through the gore, Evans tries to dash that hope until the red stuff oozes out.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, disturbing images, pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity
Cast: Luke Evans, Adelaide Clemens, Derek Magyar, Beau Knapp, America Olivo
Credits: Directed by Ryûhei Kitamura, written by David Cohen. An Anchor Bay release.
Running time: 1:26

Interesting speculative piece on Deadline.com today about Marvel’s potential problems lining up the stars for an “Avengers” sequel. With Robert Downey Jr. on track to take home $50-60 million or more from “Iron Man 3,” and contractually free from the character, Marvel will have to spend a fortune to get him into an “Avengers” sequel.

“Iron Man 3” has cleared $725 million, worldwide. Downey’s deal is such that the more the movie makes, the more he does, too.

Everybody involved in these films has grown in stature, thanks to them. Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans. Those without contracts in place they could be prohibitively expensive to sign up.

It’s one thing for a hyped movie to open, blow up and surprise expectations, as “The Avengers” did. It’s another for that being a MUST HAPPEN scenario for Marvel to have a prayer of breaking even. Maybe a slimmed down “Avengers”?

Young tourists party their way across Chile, hitting the clubs, hunting for a little “Third World” experience.
“Like, COOL Third World,” one explains. “You know. Like Bali.”
They chatter on their cell phones, hit on drunken hotties and sprinkle Yiddish into their pick-up lines. Which don’t work on the likes of, oh, Selena Gomez.
But wait, the inept Jewish flirt they all call “The Gringo?”  That’s Eli “Hostel” Roth. Then there’s that hint of “Turistas” menace to the out-of-control situations that the rich punk Pollo (Nicolas Martinez) gets them into. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s a dead ringer for Zach “The Hangover” Galifianakis, the LAST guy you’d want as your tour guide. Maybe it’s the way they say “dead bodies” instead of “cheese” when posing for photos.
Or maybe that title — “Aftershock” — tells you this won’t be that different from everything else Eli Roth has had a hand in. Sure, it’s all drinks and skirt chasing fun. But sooner or later, the blood will flow. Count on it.
“Aftershock,” which Roth co-wrote, is a sometimes grimly entertaining disaster/horror thriller about being in the wrong part of the world with the wrong life and language skills when disaster happens. It starts with a light and funny first act — hear Chilean miner sex analogies, see The Gringo strike out with every woman he meets (Selena Gomez among them). See the wild sister Kylie (Lorenza Izzo) try to escape the protective clutches of her Hungarian sibling (Andrea Osvart). See Ariel (Ariel Levy) beg his not-taking-phone-messages girlfriend to take him back.
And watch Pollo do his best Latino Zach as he throws his money and his weight around in search of “the best party in Chile.”
That would be in Valparaiso. Where the earthquake hits.
“Aftershock” then becomes a catalog of most every unpleasant way of dying you can imagine — crushed to death, impaled to death, immolated, shot, raped, tortured. Six shallow party animals are forced to make life-or-death decisions while still buzzed from drinking and while still in their club wear in a city none of them know.
The foreshadowing in the script is cute and obvious, and you can see or make a good guess at what third act “surprises” are in store. But the depiction of their trek through the bowels of a city that’s been reduced to hellish ruin is spot on, with shaky hand-held cameras capturing the quake and aftershocks, the suspenseful attempts at saving this person or that one and the chases that come when the walls of the local prison tumble and anarchy sets in.
As genre mash-ups go, “Aftershock” is a bit of an overreach. Perhaps worrying over sustaining suspense and ratcheting up the tension should have taken precedence over the many obvious plot twists. But it works well enough. It’s just a shame what it’ll do for Valparaiso tourism. The place looks lovely, until the earth start shaking. 

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence including rape, language, drug content and some nudity |
Cast: Eli Roth, Andrea Osvart, Lorenza Izzo, Nicolas Martinez, Ariel Levy, Natasha Yaravenko
Credits: Directed by Nicolas Lopez, written by Guillermo Amoedo, Nicolas Lopez and Eli Roth. A Radius/TWC release.
Running time: 1:29

Jazzy, fizzy and often quite fun, Baz Luhrmann’s “Pretty Good Gatsby” takes F. Scott Fizgerald’s Great American Novel out for a sometimes dazzling, always irreverent spin.
The gauzy picture postcard 3D production design and superb leading players breathe life into the Jazz Age novel. But the “Moulin Rouge” director’s barely-contained determination to Australianize, if not outright bastardize “The Great Gatsby” is constantly at war with a book and a cast that scream “classic.” And Luhrmann isn’t having that.
Gatbsy’s orgiastic parties are set to hip hop music. A clumsy sanitarium-set framing device gives Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) a tad too much F. Scott Fitzgerald biography and too little of Nick, the shrewd but passive observer. And some of the supporting player choices take you right out of the movie. Seriously, what Luhrmann and “color blind casting” do to the “gambler” and gangster Meyer Wolfsheim is so far removed from Jewish caricature or stereotype as to be laughable.
But Maguire is close to perfect as Nick, the struggling bond salesman, would-be writer and teller of the tale of his neighbor, the mysterious, “richer than God” Jay Gatsby, and of inbred aristocracy that Nick’s cousin, Daisy, was born into and married into. Carey Mulligan makes for a cannier Daisy than the hapless ditz Mia Farrow turned her into back when Robert Redford played Gatsby.
Joel Edgerton (“Animal Kingdom”) makes the brawny, bigoted Tom Buchanan an understandable, if not remotely sympathetic, guardian of his polo playing “ruling class.”
And Leonardo DiCaprio brings depth, neediness and focus to Jay Gatsby, who has copied the manners, affectations and dress of America’s not-noble-at-all nobility, all in pursuit of his feminine ideal — Daisy.
Photographed right, there’s a Wellesian larger than life aura about DiCaprio, and Luhrmann introduces him as the character in a grand moment that includes confetti, fireworks and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” — a tune composed two years after this film is set (1922), but close enough to be perfect.
Nick rents a rundown bungalow next door to Gatsby’s Disneyland-sized mansion. He finds himself the go-between in the mysterious millionaire’s obsession, a way for Gatsby to see the woman he loved but who lived totally outside of his income years before. All that’s he earned, all that he’s made of himself in Prohibition Era America, he did for her.
Daisy’s unhappily married to a bullying philanderer.  Tom and Nick may have gone to Yale together, and Daisy’s his cousin. But with her pal, the rich sportswoman Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki, whose athletic pursuits seem limited to catwalks), he conspires to get Gatsby in a room alone with Daisy.
Which isn’t where the trouble starts, but where the tale takes its fateful turn toward the fatal.
Tom cheats with Myrtle (Isla Fisher) and uses Nick just as Gatsby would — as a “beard,” an alibi and co-conspirator. Poor Nick is trapped in a daze of booze and sex, mannered courtship and “appearances.”
Luhrmann stages stunningly choreographed parties which suggest a high class rave with an unlimited budget set to a furious hip hop beat. Long shots are painterly fantasy landscapes, the hazy bright-colored impressionism of memory. Manhattan is a garishly colorized sea of neon and noise.
But this movie hangs utterly on performance, and DiCaprio’s Gatsby is mesmerizing. His studied use of “old sport,” awkward attempts at poses and occasional lapses — dropping the Jay Gatsby facade — are exactly right, even if they go beyond the novel’s dense texture of mystery.
“Highballs, Mr. Gatsby?”
“Highballs it is.”
The beating heart of the book, its aspirational “Great Expectations” ethos — coveting wealth to recreate an imagined past and idealized future — shines through in this performance. The emptiness of those pursuits — money, partying, marrying for status — seems more modern than ever.
But it is DiCaprio’s lovelorn, hopeful, grasping and nostalgic Gatsby that stands out, a man who earns Nick’s finest compliment, one of the greatest lines in all of literature.
“They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch of them put together.”

(The early numbers are in, “Gatsby’s” already a blockbuster)

(Got questions for “Gatsby’s” Isla Fisher? Go here)

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some violent images, sexual content, smoking, partying and brief language
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, Tobey Maguire, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher
Credits: Directed by Baz Luhrmann, scripted by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:23

One of the pioneers in stop motion animation and movie special effects has died. OK, you knew exactly who I was talking about just from that description.

There is but one such pioneer who has achieved fame to match (almost) his movies. Ray Harryhausen, who brought the original “Mighty Joe Young” to life, whose models and model photography jazzed up many a sword and scorcery tale  — “Jason and the Argonauts,” “Clash of the Titans” – has died. He was 92.

Learning from Hitchcock, he made his name a brand, so much so that he’s often credited with stop-motion model work in films he didn’t make. But from the late ’50s on into the ’80s, Harryhausen & Co. were the folks you called when a guy in monster makeup wouldn’t do. CGI greatly reduced the need for this sort of admittedly jerky/fake looking effect. But that was part of the work’s charm, something you can still appreciate in stop-motion animated films such as “Coraline” or “Frankenweenie.” The very artifice of it all is so plainly human and creative.

A long and productive life, and an influential one. Peter Jackson, Spielberg, a lot of the greats were inspired by Harryhausen’s hand-crafted  movie magic.