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I went to the opening night of the LA Film Festival last night (i.e., Richard Linklater‘s Bernie plus the after-party). I drove into the underground LA Live lot around 5:15 pm and left around 11:30 pm, and it cost me $25 bills . I’m not going to pay between $200 and $225 to see movies down there over the next nine days. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ll probably park 1/3 or 1/2 mile west of the Regal and then ride my bike the rest of the way.

There’s apparently some friend-of-the-festival deal that lets you park in the West garage for $8 bucks if you stay less than four hours, but a friend tried to do this and got hit for $25 anyway. This is bad, very bad. I’ll take a $10 or $12 hit but not $25.

I love that Donald Sutherland and Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi will be occasional guests on Keith Olbermann‘s new “Countdown” show, which debuts on Current TV on Monday, 6.20 at 8 p.m. I’ve never watched Current before (it’s channel 142 on my Time-Warner system) but I guess I will now. I’m disappointed, of course, that it’s not available in high-def. I don’t like 1.37 to 1 analog images.

Current TV is available in 60 million homes; during the last quarter it reportedly averaged 30,000 viewers in primetime.

I experienced a form of mild humiliation during last night’s LA FilmFest opening-night soiree. It was due to a light-hearted ping-pong volley that was mostly about, I’m ashamed to admit, astrology. I listened because she was somewhere between an 8.5 and a 9, but by the time it was over I got an earful, you bet.

To some extent I can understand, I think, what it was like to be a black man in the Jim Crow South, a Jew in Weimar Germany of the early 1930s, and a gay man in the pre-Stonewall era. Because I am a Scorpio — an astrological sign that has been savaged by astrology writers for decades. People of my sign have been relentlessly described as verbally vicious, emotionally vindictive, hair-trigger whiplashers with razor-sharp talons, and so I’ve been accused aforethought and regarded askance all my life.

Astrological authors really have it in big-time for Scorpios. They condemn them without mercy. No other sign get shat upon like mine. And we’re talking, remember, about each and every person born under the Scorpio sign being some kind of must-to-avoid fiend. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of us walking around with arrogant and sadistic terrorist personalities, ready to pounce on our victims and rip them to shreds and chew their ears off.

I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near a Scorpio based on their descriptions, and yet I’ve been near Scorpios all my life and gotten to know and admire and care for quite a few of them, and the overwhelming majority have been very sharp and resourceful and fascinating blah-blah, or at least interesting mixed bags.

So a long time ago I decided that the people who write these truly ugly condemnations (“unscrupulous terrorist, morbid jealousy, total arrogance, sadistic and aggressive brutality”) are not just ugly themselves but also fucking deranged, and to throw out the whole astrological analysis thing and just trust my own instincts and feelings.

I know what “Scorpio” means, and I’m not a vampire or a werewolf or a zoo animal. I have thoughts and observational powers and experience and determinations that have come from decades of living. And I know what “Taurus” and “Virgo” and “Libra” and “Gemini” and “Aquarius” mean, and it’s mostly sloppy-crap shorthand that sometimes echoes in little ways and sometimes has nothing to do with anything.

No one of any brain size or developed intelligence buys into astrology as anything more than a time-waster. Nobody who knows anything and has been around goes there.

Yesterday afternoon I spoke with novelist-screenwriter Roger Simon, who wrote the early versions of A Better Life (he ended up with a “story by” credit) before being rewritten by Eric Eason. But the basic bones of the screenplay are his. We did about 20 minutes in the offices of IDPR on Hollywood Boulevard.

Simon is CEO of Pajamas Media. He’s the author of ten novels, including the Moses Wine detective series, and six screenplays including Enemies, a Love Story, Bustin’ Loose, My Man Adam and Scenes from a Mall. His first non-fiction book, Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror, was published by Encounter Books in February 2009.

Environmental activist and Last Mountain star Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. delivered some brilliant and impassioned remarks last night following a special invitational screening at the Westside Pavillion. I only managed to capture a small portion of what he said (you don’t want to hear my excuses), but at least I captured a good riff about how you can’t rely on the news media to report the really tough stories because most of the news orgs are compromised to varying degrees by their corporate owners.

Yes, Kennedy has a hoarse and scratchy voice but he’s a real firebrand and he knows his facts and figures.

I ran into Warner Bros. Entertainment president & COO Alan Horn last night during an after-party for The Last Mountain at the Westside Pavillion. I asked him about that $300 million figure that some say is the tab for The Green Lantern. Correct, he said, if you count marketing. The film cost about $200 million and the worldwide marketing total is about $100 million.

Paddy Considine‘s Tyrannosaur, one of the most assuredly artful and emotionally affecting films I’ve seen this year, is playing on Friday (i.e., tomorrow) and Sunday at the L.A. Film Festival. I’d been presuming that an opportunity to interview Considine would be there for interested journalists. But Considine isn’t attending the festival deu to being on a shoot somewhere, and he’s not doing any phoners either, I’m told.

Tyrannosaur costars Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman, Eddie Marsan.

And there’s no YouTube trailer, although I’m informed that one is being finalized as we speak. I don’t get the absence of a trailer for a major film that played at Sundance 2011, which was six months ago, with the film about to show twice at LAFF. What could Strand be waiting for? I’m trying to persuade them to let me speak to Considine anyway.

Here‘s what I wrote last January:

“A publicist asked for a quote about Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, and here’s what I gave her: “The most original adult love story I’ve seen in ages. Easily the biggest shock of the Sundance Film Festival so far. I didn’t see this one coming — it’s a much stronger and more focused film than I expected from a smallish British drama about an older working-class guy with a temper problem. It curiously touches.

“Tyrannosaur is a drama that deals almost nothing but surprise cards — a tough story of discipline, redemption and wounded love. Cheers to director-writer Considine for making something genuine and extra-unique. He’s not just an actor who’s branched into directing with a special facility for coaxing good performances — he’s a world-class director who knows from shaping, cutting, timing, holding back and making it all come together.”

“The performances from Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman and Eddie Marsan simultaneously stand alone and reach in and grab hold. In fact each and every performance (and I mean right down to the dogs) is aces.

“The beast of the title is Joseph (Mullan), an alcoholic, widowed, violence-prone rage monster who lives alone in Leeds. He all but melts when he encounters Hannah (Colman), a kind and trusting shop merchant who shows Joseph a little tenderness. Hannah talks the Christian talk but is just as close to alcohol, which she’s turned to as a sanctuary from her ghastly marriage to a homely, ultra-possessive monster of another sort (Marsan) who brings violence and subjugation to Hannah on a constant basis.

“Once Mullan and Colman have formed a kind of friendship, the inevitable final conflict with Marsan awaits. One naturally expects (and in facts savors, if truth be told) some sort of howling, knock-down, face-gashing fight between Mullan and Marsan, but…well, I’ll leave it there but it’s more than a bit of a surprise what happens.

“I was so taken with Tyrannosaur in the screening’s immediate wake that I shared my reactions with a young freelancer I’d spoken with in the cattle tent. He’d just seen it as well, and basically went ‘meh.’ My mouth almost fell open. ‘You think what we just saw is just okay?,” I thought but didn’t say. Jeezus Christ. It takes all sorts and sensibilities to make a world.”

This is one of the most romantic and beautiful couple-in-love photos I’ve ever seen in my life. It was taken last night in Vancouver by Getty Images’ Rich Lam, and wasn’t, it would appear, “staged.” It’s not just in the same league as that “Kiss by the Hotel de Ville” photo taken in Paris in 1950 by Robert Doisneau as well as Alfred Eisenstaedt‘s “sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day” — it’s also a lot sexier.

Official caption: “A couple kisses while police walk in the streets during riots following the Stanley Cup finals in Vancouver, Canada, on Wednesday, June 15. Vancouver broke out in riots after their hockey team, the Vancouver Canucks, lost in Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals.”

If the past is any indication, for the rest of his life Elvis Mitchell is going to lose or quit a never-ending series of cool film-industry jobs. And within two or three months of each departure he’s going to land another new cool film-industry job. Since the ’90s he’s been one of the most frequently hired guys in liberal Hollywoodland. And a cat — incapable of not landing on his feet. Mitchell’s latest bounce-back, announced by Indiewrie‘s Anne Thompson, is a gig as “outsourced film curator” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Mitchell will book films and guests.

Rep. Anthony Weiner will resign this afternoon. Revealing your tumescent animal member on any social-media platform robs you of any aura of authority. The more you allow Mr. Happy to run the show, the weaker and stupider you are. And it breaks my heart because Weiner’s speeches about the corrupted dynamic of Washington power were right on the money.

I’m hearing that Weiner isn’t independently wealthy and needs a job. What’s he going to do? Who’s going to hire the poor guy? He’s radioactive.

Until Monday night’s Republican presidential contenders debate, I hadn’t quite realized how tiny Rep. Michelle Bachmann is. Notice how shrimp-like she seems compared to the other guys (i.e., much shorter than Ron Paul, who’s about 5’9″), even in heels. She appears to be 4′ 11″, which is right next to dwarf territory. And nothing I’d heard or read about her previously even mentioned the height factor…odd.

(l. to r.) Former Sen. Rick Santorum, Bachmann, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, businessman Herman Cain (i.e., “the Hermanator”).

I remain convinced that one of the many reasons Michael Dukakis lost to George Bush, Sr. in ’88 is that a certain percentage of voters felt he was just too short to be President. (He looked like Rocky the squirrel in that catastrophic tank footage.) Modest-sized candidates like John McCain (around 5’8″) will never take any height flack, and I would imagine even a candidate standing 5’3″ or 5’4″ would be semi-acceptable to most voters. But to be less than five feet tall strikes a symbolically inappropriate note on some level.