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.

Bring me the head of the Phillip K. Dick android. When you find it, I mean. Gotta be somewhere.

Critic Joe Leydon on Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth — exceptionally well-written.

L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan (l.) and director-writer Neil LaBute during L.A. Film festival-sponsored discussion at Westwood’s Armand Hammer Museum — Friday, 6.23, 7:15 pm.

(a) Woman about to order a beer at Farmer’s Market — Thursday, 6.22.06, 5:35 pm; (b) L.A. Film Festival outdoor screening of West Side Story in Westwood Village (but showing it at wrong aspect ratio…horizontally squeezed…fire the projectionist!) — Friday, 6.23.06, 8:45 pm; (c) Pages of old TV Guide from Friday, November 22, 1963, full of programs that never aired; (d) ditto; (e) One of those color shots taken during filming of Some Like It Hot ; (f) Another Farmer’s Market shot.

I said I’d get to my Prada review, but now I have to go see Kenny Turan and Neil Labute rip it up at the Hammer. In the meantime, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt has given it (and Meryl Streep in particular) a thumbs-up, Variety ‘s Todd McCarthy was mezzo-mezzo, and MCN’s David Poland has slammed it.

You get told stuff (like, say, Karen Fried becoming the new Oscar consultant for Focus Features or Michelle Robertson becoming the Warner Bros. Oscar consultant) but on the condition that you wait, and what happens? Somebody else breaks it. Happens every time.

“After a comprehensive review of climate change data, the nation’s preeminent scientific body found that average temperatures on Earth had risen by about 1 degree over the last century, a development that ‘is unprecedented for the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia’,” L.A. Times reporters Thomas H. Maugh II and Karen Kaplan wrote in a story out today. “The report from the National Research Council also concluded that ‘human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.’ Coupled with a report last month from the Bush administration’s Climate Change Science Program that found “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system,” the new study from the council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, signals a growing acceptance in Washington of widely held scientific views on the causes of global warming.” Whoa…whatta shocker!

Missed last night’s news about the plug being pulled on James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma, which was going to star Tom Cruise earlier this year and then lost Cruise and got Russell Crowe to step into his shoes. Nicole Laporte‘s Variety story quoted “sources” as saying that “part of Sony’s concern was the back-end gross of Crowe, a $20 million star [on top of} another concern that Westerns don’t typically travel abroad.” Mangold says Yuma isn’t a typical ponderous western, etc., but obviously this is yet another shutdown of a big-star movie over concerns about back-end gross participation. Go, ballsy studio execs…kick those stars in the ass! Cut ’em down to size! Stand tall, hang tough…revolution is in the air! (Claude Brodesser on TMZ.com agrees — “Hollywood to Gross Players: Drop Dead.”)

These ass-whoopings of Adam Sandler‘s Click are loads of fun to read, mainly because they’re so damn personal. These critics don’t just hate Sandler’s latest — they hate him through and through. “What’s wrong with this movie isn’t the movie, it’s Sandler himself,” says the Washington Post‘s Stephen Hunter. “His sensibility and sense of humor are aggressively hostile, [and his character] is a selfish, self-absorbed, smug little weenie who turns on everybody at the drop of a hat, who cheats to succeed, who brutalizes his children, who screams at his wife, and who looks to be a pretty mediocre architect in the bargain.” L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas echoes this by calling Click “the strongest dose yet of the anger, self-loathing and infantilism that lie at the heart of Sandler√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s screen persona.” And guess what? Click is likely to do better than $40 million this weekend.

Anne Thompson and Tatiana Siegel‘s Hollywood Reporter profile of Paramount president Gail Berman makes some fair points, but the graph about Mission: Impossible 3 recalled a conversation I had last night with a trade-paper guy about whether or not the Tom Cruise actioner made any kind of real profit. “M:I:3…has earned more than $334 million worldwide [but] did fall short domestically, grossing $130 million,” the Thompson-Siegel story reports. “In retrospect, [studio chairman Brad] Grey’s decision to trim the film’s budget to $150 million and adjust gross-participation deals proved to be one of his savviest moves as studio chief.” Nonetheless, somebody needs to compile an exacting, exhaustive report about how much everything really cost and, factoring in marketing and Cruise’s first-dollar participation (which was still pretty high despite the adjustment forced by Grey), how much money Paramount actually made on this puppy. There’s a view out there that the end-of-the-day profits, if M:I3 was in fact profitable (as it has come to the end of its theatrical run), don’t amount to much.

The L.A. Film Festival kicked off last night with a screening of The Devil Wears Prada at Westwood’s Village theatre. It seemed to go down pretty well with people I spoke to at the after-party, including the tough critics. A tidy, not-quite-pat, cool-mannered studio flick about a tough job and a tough environment. Everyone seemed to love Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci‘s performance, and felt that lead Anne Hathaway and Adrien Grenier held their own.

Waiting in the third-class “peon” rush line alongside the Village theatre last night.

It was the usual mob scene before the show began with a lot of traffic pile-up, dozens of SEM goons everywhere, and journalists being handed peon-level blue tickets that meant they had to wait in a kind of rush line on the side of the building. (I was one of them.) You had to pay for popcorn and drinks in the lobby, which is unusual for a premiere, but the food-and-drink at the outdoor after-party was ample and delicious.
(a) SEM security goon outside Village theatre — Thursday, 6.22.06, 7:20 pm; (b) Same position,couple of minutes later Thursday, 6.22.06, 7:25 pm; (c) MPRM publicist whom I won’t identify unless she tells me it’s cool, approaching theatre entrance; (d) An employee of high-powered publicist Mickey Cottrell named Pollyanna (l.) and Islander star-producer Thomas Hildreth; (e) Floral arrangement outside entrance to Village theatre balcony.