Weeds costars Demian Bichir and Mary-Louise Parker were given a tribute last night at the Sonoma Int’l Film Festival. A large audience sat in Veteran’s Hall and listened to a spirited q & a, during which Parker wouldn’t stop praising Bichir’s acting gift and especially his Oscar-nominated performance in A Better Life.

(l. to r.) Sonoma Int’l Film Festival honcho Kevin McNeely, Demian Bichir, Mary-Louise Parker following last night’s tribute.

For whatever reason nobody mentioned that roughly five months hence Bichir will begin directing Refugio, a love story that he’s been writing and re-writing for five years. It will shoot in the U.S. and Mexico. His upcoming feature films include Dom Hemingway, Machete Kills and The Heat. He also has a significant role in The Bridge, a 2013 TV series.

A big invitational dinner followed the tribute. I chatted with Demian a bit and said hello to Mary-Louise. I don’t mean to sound uncaring but I wasn’t a fan of the appetizer (a beet dish). By the time the entree began to be served I had to leave to catch a 9 pm screening of Eric Christensen‘s The Cover Story, a doc about the art of ’60s and ’70s album jackets. But thank you, Sonoma Int’l Film Festival, for a very pleasant evening and for your abundant generosity.

The Cover Story was too much to take. I fled at the half-hour mark. It appears to have been made with the assumption that nobody has heard of the super-groups that reigned in the ’60s and ’70s, requiring that their commercial and artistic exploits have to be recited ad infinitum. It’s very tedious. On top of which the narrator speaks in a slick salesman tone that sounds like his main gig is narrating infomercials for potato slicers and cleaning equipment. The deal-breaker was when he recalled the death of John Lennon in the manner of…oh, Wheel of Fortune‘s Pat Sajak?