Jean Luc Godard‘s “influence is immeasurable, yet his popular reputation stems from only a small fraction of his output,” remarks a Sunday (6.25) N.Y. Times piece by Nathan Lee. “From 1960 to 1967 [Godard] became immensely famous for a series of radical entertainments that fused youth-quake insouciance and jazzy improvisation to genre deconstruction and high-culture formalism. They were genre movies with a twist: pseudo gangster films (Breathless), thrillers (Le Petit Soldat), war movies (Les Carabiniers) musicals (A Woman Is a Woman), science fiction (Alphaville). He is the original meta-movie maestro, the first director as D.J. He is also an accomplished film critic, and has always maintained that writing and directing are two sides of the same coin. But when the familiar reference points to Hollywood vanished in the 1970’s, as he became more occupied with Marxism and avant-garde video, people stopped paying attention.” I remember a story Andrew Sarris told me in the late ’70s about the moment he informed Richard Roud and other Manhattan-based Godard acolytes that he had gotten “off the boat.” I’ve been a Godard dilletante all my life — there for the classic entires (my all-time favorite is Weekend) and spotty on his more recent stuff (In Praise of Love, Our Music). And yet I’m unquestionably into seeing, for the first time, Masculine Feminine at the L.A. Film Festival next Thursday, 6.29.