The day after the mega-premiere of "Twilight: Eclipse" last week, Kristen Stewart was back at the Los Angeles Film Festival on Friday night for a decidedly more low-key event, supporting the film "Welcome to the Rileys" alongside cast members Melissa Leo and James Gandolfini. The film premiered earlier this year at Sundance and was recently picked up by Samuel Goldwyn Films for a planned fall release.

Writer Ken Hixon and producer Michael Costigan -- director Jake Scott was not in attendance -- first fielded a few questions after the screening. It was hard, however, not to feel that much of the room was simply waiting on Stewart, dressed in a short, simple black dress but having traded in the high heels of her arrival photos for a pair of low-top Converse sneakers. The first few rows of the audience seemed to skew more strictly female and decidedly younger than the larger audience, and the constant photo-taking revealed them as likely "Twi-hards."

It can be difficult, amidst the "Twilight" hubbub, to keep in mind that Stewart is a gifted actress and "Welcome to the Rileys" plays first and foremost as an actors' piece, allowing Stewart, Gandolfini and Leo to turn in three layered, deeply felt performances that seem natural and human even as the film's story takes some unlikely turns. Gandolfini plays a Midwestern businessman who goes to New Orleans on a business trip and meets a teenage stripper/prostitute played by Stewart. The two strike up an uneasy alliance; not a romance but maybe not always a pure friendship either, with each looking for something from the other. When Leo arrives, as Gandolfini's wife, the dynamics adjust again.

Rebecca Yeldham, LAFF director, moderated the discussion and first asked Stewart if she consciously chose parts "that couldn't be further from Bella" when taking roles outside the smash supernatural romance series that has made her an international sensation.

To discuss "The Human Centipede (First Sequence)," the shock-horror film that opens this weekend in New York and on demand everywhere before coming to Los Angeles next week, is to describe a movie that might ring the ears of a more sensitive soul. Or almost anyone else.

If you haven't been combing horror websites, which have been enthralled and/or repulsed by the premise for the last few months, here's the basic idea: "Human Centipede" features a retired surgeon in Germany (played with creepy brio by the aptly named Dieter Laser) who captures a Japanese playboy (Akihiro Kitamura) and two American party girls (Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie) and then surgically connects them together so they share one gastric system. Visualize the grossest version of what that might look like and you may come close.

The film has been a sensation at horror-centric film festivals, winning two prizes at Austin's influential Fantastic Fest last fall. A sensation of a certain kind, that is. Even when screened for audiences in the mood to be grossed out, director Tom Six's particular breed of body horror causes hardened gore aficionados to squirm and ask, "Did I really need to see that?" (The film's poster boasts the rather outlandish claim that is "100% Medically Accurate!," which is rather hard to, um, swallow.)

So how provocative is it? 

Anyone who's surfed a film festival website knows well the joys of a good site -- and the perils of a messy one. Bad interfaces and wonky presentations lead to all kinds of mishaps. The Soviet Union employed better technology.

Things have been improving thanks to a database and tech firm called Festival Genius, which has come on strong in recent years. The technology has been widely praised by the independent-film world, and festival-goers, by all anecdotal accounts, have been pleased.

The firm was on, unfortunately, its way to extinction after owner B-Side shut down March 1. But thanks to a nifty indie-world maneuver, it will survive.

A New York-based company called Slated has acquired the intellectual property rights to the technology and has in turn licensed it to the nonprofit IFP. Former B-Side executives Chris Hyams and Mike McCown have joined Slated, while other members of B-Side's festival team are now at IFP.

More than 200 film festivals have used the technology to build online program guides and schedules. Several, including Sundance, Fantastic Fest and NewFest, have already committed to using it again. So the next time you're surfing and want to find out what's playing at a festival, you might actually, well, find out.

-- Mark Olsen

The South by Southwest Film Festival jury has handed "Tiny Furniture," Lena Dunham's story about the  listless post-graduation life of a woman in her 20s, its narrative feature prize and also given Dunham its breakout award of "emergent narrative woman director."

"Tiny Furniture," in which Dunham also stars, has the main character walking a minefield of self-esteem issues and romantic complications in her post-college years. The crisply shot film costars Dunham's real-life mother and sister and was shot largely in their family's New York City apartment.

The festival on Tuesday also awarded a special jury prize for best ensemble to "Myth of the American Sleepover," directed by David Robert Mitchell, with an award for individual performance going to Brian Hasenfus for his role in Garth Donovan's "Phillip the Fossil."

Jeff Malmberg's "Marwencol" won the documentary feature prize at the festival, with a runner-up award  handed to "War Don Don," directed by Rebecca Richman Cohen. Audience prizes were given to the documentary "For Once in My Life," directed by Jeff Bingham and Mark Moormann, and the narrative feature "Brotherhood," directed by Will Canon.

With her modern-day, Elaine May-esque mix of anxiety, humor and insight, Dunham grew this year into just the kind of fresh voice SXSW seems designed to spotlight. The prize for "Tiny Furniture" was also validation for the self-nurturing system of SXSW; Dunham met many of her key collaborators on the project while attending the festival with her film "Creative Nonfiction" last year.

"Marwencol" tells the story of Mark Hogancamp, an upstate New York man who suffers debilitating brain damage after a bar fight. As a means of physical and emotional therapy, he creates an intricately detailed scale of a WWII-era Belgian town in his backyard. As the world of the miniature town takes on a life of its own in Hogancamp's imagination, his photographs of his handiwork begin to garner attention in the art world. Malmberg's documentary generated buzz after its first screening over the weekend, with attendees feverishly handing about copies of a book of Hogancamp's photos.

The film centers on a strong subject and builds a balanced structure around him, as Malmberg carefully introduces viewers to Hogancamp and his world, creating a delicate sense of understanding and empathy.

— Mark Olsen

Photo: Laurie Simmons and Lena Dunham in "Tiny Furniture." Credit: SXSW

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At the MacGruber premiere at SXSW Monday night, director Jorma Taccone noted that there was still some postproduction work to be done, “but it's going to be good, you guys." The audience couldn’t have agreed more resoundingly.

It’s a minor miracle “MacGruber” even exists. A parody featuring a "MacGyver"-esque action hero who tries to defuse bombs with household items (and generally fails), the movie grew out of an unassuming "Saturday Night Live" skit after said skit became an online sensation.

Writers Taccone (himself a veteran of the viral-video sensation Lonely Island), John Solomon and Will Forte were able to come up with a storyline from only the barest bit of source material. Not that it matters.

The film plays as a loving parody/homage to '80s action films, full of ridiculous montages -- love-making, getting ready to fight, etc. -- a soft-rock soundtrack and ironic sense of self-seriousness.  There is something wonderfully daft about the film's sense of randomness as it takes ridiculous lines of dialogue (mostly unprintable here) and builds them into outrageous running gags.

It’s not spoiling anything to say that things explode a lot, to the delight of the SXSW audience. When the final countdown began at the film's climax -- with the skit's signature line, "Three minutes, MacGruber!" -- it brought down the house. 

The story, to the extent that it matters, finds MacGruber (Will Forte) trying to stop his longtime nemesis (Val Kilmer) from launching a stolen nuclear missile at Washington. There is a lot of talk about getting codes, little of it of actual consequence.

Cast members Forte, Kristen Wiig, Ryan Phillippe and Kilmer all came out for the screening. When taking the stage after the movie, Taccone asked if Kilmer was still there. Realizing the actor was not coming on stage, Taccone quoted a line from the movie: "Classic." (Prior to the screening, the director had noted of Phillippe, "I'm still very confused as to why he agreed to be in the movie.") Taccone and Phillippe also both noted that the film was shot in only 28 days, a remarkably tight schedule for an action comedy.

One questioner asked what became of a rumored cameo from Richard Dean Anderson, of course the original MacGyver. There’s talk of a lawsuit from Lee Zlotoff, the original creator of "MacGyver," and Taccone said the original script did feature a scene for MacGruber's father, but that it was cut.
"And that's all I'll say about that," Taccone added. Classic.

--Mark Olsen

Photo: From left, Ryan Phillipe, Will Forte and Kristen Wiig in "MacGruber." Credit: Greg Peters / Rogue Pictures

Franco's voice can sometimes be heard from off-screen, and there is a bluntness to his questions, as if he was trying to dig deeper than his subjects were letting him go. Some of the best insights -- and for comedy nerds there is still a lot here of interest -- come from moments when Franco smokes a cigarette with longtime producer Steve Higgins (now the announcer on Jimmy Fallon's late-night show). Maybe three-quarters of the way through, Franco uses footage from an interview with Michaels. The "SNL" creator points out that putting cameras in the room with performers always warps the situation. There is something wonderfully droll about the ease with which Michaels dismisses Franco's documentary even as it's being made, almost implying that by definition it cannot be an accurate portrait of what goes on at "SNL." Given the finished product, it's hard to disagree.

--Mark Olsen

Photo: A sketch on "Saturday Night Live." Credit: NBC

Photo: "Amer." Credit: SXSW

The final product of those early efforts is headed to theaters this summer. Michael Finch and Alex Litvak take writing credit on the film, in which a group of hardened killers -- played by the likes of Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Alice Braga and Danny Trejo -- are dropped onto a safari planet used by the Predator creatures for hunting and sport. They are found by a man (Laurence Fishburne) who has, against the odds, survived on the planet. The film was shot partly in Hawaii but mostly in Austin at Rodriguez's Troublemaker Studios. Rodriguez and Antal stressed that there was little computer-effects work done for the film.  This is "no CG Predators," Antal said -- practical special effects were mostly used, and there were essentially no green-screen shots.

Rodriguez and Antal, joined by effects wizard Greg Nicotero, didn't reveal that many plot points at the event, offering mainly a slide show with concept art from the production. They also unveiled the Predator head from the film, which was a big hit with the crowd. People lined up to take a closer look as Nicotero worked a remote-control device to operate the creature's mouth and face.

Anyone hoping for actual footage from the film, however, walked away a bit frustrated. They showed two variations of essentially the same trailer, with just a few different shots between them, and one short scene in which Fishburne meets the rest of the crew.

Keeping details from the film under wraps was obviously a top priority at the event, where attendees were reminded repeatedly not to film anything, and even taking pictures seemed to be frowned upon. One might have thought they were revealing far more than they actually did at this fanboy promotion.

Photo: "Predator" movie poster. Credit: 20th Century Fox

--Mark Olsen

Part fanboy gathering and indie-film hot spot, the festival hasn't yet generated the buyer frenzy of other festivals but it is now considered one of the best launching pads for crowd-pleasing studio romps. In addition to hosting the world premiere of April 16's "Kick-Ass" from Lionsgate, this year's Austin, Texas,  festival will be showing July 9's "Predators" from 20th Century Fox and May 21's "MacGruber" from Universal.

The film festival, which will be covered for The Times by Indie Focus columnist Mark Olsen, also has set screenings for a number of Sundance titles, including its grand jury prize-winning "Winter's Bone," along with "The Runaways," "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil," "The Taqwacores," "Skateland"  and "Lovers of Hate."

Here's a fuller report from this week's Word of Mouth column:

South by Southwest's film festival is hospitable

By Mark Olsen and John Horn

They don't have much in common -- the Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker," the independent film on aging "That Evening Sun," and the upcoming comic book adaptation “Kick-Ass" -- except for the same U.S. premiere location: the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival.

Coming halfway between Sundance and Cannes, the Austin, Texas, gathering grows in importance every year. Starting Friday, the 17-year-old festival, anchored by its older, overlapping music festival, has turned into an increasingly eclectic blend of oddball studio fare, genre films and micro-budget indies, with its largely local audience welcoming pretty much whatever programmers throw at them.

Read the rest here:

--John Horn

Photo of Kristen Wiig, Will Forte and Ryan Phillippe in "MacGruber" from Universal Studios

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