Is it the least bit bothersome to anyone (except for the conservatives who read this column) that Adam Sandler is an alleged Rudy Giuliani supporter, and is otherwise regarded as a Bruce Willis-type supporter of right-of-center candidates and causes? I don’t think it’s such a bad thing for a Hollywood guy to be a Giuliani man. It’s a little weird, but far from criminal. I just don’t want to hear anything about Sandler supporting Bush/Cheney/Rove or the Iraqi adventure. (Note: Apologies for misspelling Giuliani’s name — I’ll never get it wrong again.)

“After reading the postings to your blog, I think the folks who have already seen this film are (a) way too young to know anything about the Vietnam War, or (b) utterly insensitive to the film’s racism and reactionary politics. I saw the picture months ago. It’s extremely well-made, but I was also appalled that it glorifies a guy who was on a secret, illegal bombing mission inside Laos when he was shot down. In addition, the movie’s view of the locals is almost unreservedly racist, in that almost everyone is portrayed as sadistic, venal, corrupt…you name it.

“There’s very little acknowledgement that the guards might be acting so brutally because guys like Dieter the pilot (Christain Bale) have been napalming their villages and destroying their crops. About the only time this comes up, in fact, is when Our Boys have to move up their escape plans because the guards, driven desperate by hunger, plan to kill the prisoners and go back to their villages, where they will hopefully find food. But this situation, essentially caused by the American bombing, is only viewed through the lens of the prisoners’ escape attempt.

“Interestingly, the film opens with footage of a bomber napalming Laos from low level, but never really follows up on this. It’s all well and good to make a movie about one man’s will to survive (and Bale is really terrific in the film), but leaving out the context means Herzog’s film is practically an apologia for American war crimes during the Vietnam era.” — hotshot Manhattan entertainment journalist Lewis Beale

Wells to Beale: I’ll forward this to Werner Herzog — maybe he’ll answer you. O rmaybe I’ll just ask him when he shows up to talk about his work between screenings at Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre.

I thought I’d start playing around with running short video clips from time to time. I’m thinking it’ll be especially cool from the Cannes Film Festival and other such destinations. I know MPEG is the easiest loading, most accessible format (I’m buying some video-converting software as we speak), but I’m wondering how difficult it is to view less common video files. I’ve loaded two — an avi file from my Canon PowerShot A540 and a video clip shot by a Treo 700. I’ll be converting to MPEGs, for sure, but can anyone view these inane driving clips with any ease or comfort?

“Question: Can a film symbolically contain all the elements of a vast, complicated and enigmatic tragedy within the microcosmic story of a single individual accidentally caught up in the ghastly mess of — for convenient example — the Iraq war? Short answer: No, not normally.

“Longer answer: A modestly mounted, but curiously poignant little documentary called The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, which somehow — quietly, devastatingly — shows and tells you more than you may perhaps want to know about the dehumanization implicit in the mighty, blighted Iraqi adventure.” — from Richard Schickel‘s Time review of Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein‘s documentary, posted 3.23.07.

“It was like watching a killer whale launch itself with barely a splash completely out of the water. Instead of the usual roar of the engines, the airliner seemed to sigh, as if there were no tension in its wings, which support 811,000 pounds during the demonstration flight. Whoa, the whale can fly! And wait a sec, I’m on the whale.” — Time‘s Coco Masters on a recent special promotional flight of the Airbus 380.

TMNT (Warner Bros., 3.23) is surging now with adults, even — 97, 29 and 9, It’s still a $25 to $35 million equation. I don’t know where 300 will fall (in second place?), but The Hills Have Eyes 2 will be right after the turtles among the newbies — 77, 30 and 11. Antoine Fuqua and Mark Wahlberg‘s Shooter will probably come in third — 64, 36, 10. Reign Over Me has been upticking over the last two or three weeks (it’s now at 64, 30 and 8), but it’s only managed a 69% Rotten Tomatoes rating. That said, L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas — a good, graceful writer who can be tough, snide and obstinate when so inclined — is eloquent in praise of it.

TMZ is reporting that the Miami New Times is reporting that Lily Tomlin has joked about that YouTube video showing her in a profane spat with director David O. Russell on the set of I Heart Huckabees. Except she didn’t joke — she sounds chagrined to me. “I’ve never seen it,” she said to an interviewer. “Is that when I’m sitting in the seat and really going nuts? Oh my God, I’m gonna die when I see that.”

I thought this was generally known, but perhaps not: that end-of-March release date for Werner Herzog‘s Rescue Dawn is no more. MGM “still does not have all delivery items from producer Steve Marlton,” says a guy in the thick of it, and there is “still some remaining legal mess has not been sorted out yet by the production.”

The thinking is to maybe release the film by the end of May in L.A. and N.Y. and try to keep it alive until the fall, or so I’ve been told. It’s all a little bit up in the air.

In any event, Herzog fans will certainly want to go to the Aero Theater in Santa Monica this coming weekend as Herzog will be giving talks between screenings of Fitzcaraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God on Saturday night and Lessons of Darkness and Grizzly Man on Sunday night.

Herzog is currently finishing a film he shot in Antarctica at the end of last year, and is expecting to screen a first version roughly two months from now.

An assessment of the heightened interest in advertising on cellphones, as summarized by N.Y. Times reporter Eric Pfanner. Mobile phones are conventionally referred to as “the third screen, behind television and the computer,” Pfanner writes. And yet Bob Greenberg, chief executive of R/GA, an agency based in New York that specializes in digital advertising, says he actually thinks about a cell phone screen “as the first one…it’s with me all the time.”

Francis Coppola scared some of us half to death when he said a few weeks ago that the themes in his latest film, Youth Without Youth, are about “time, consciousness and the dream-like basis of reality,” and that “for me it is indeed a return to the ambitions I had for my work in cinema as a student.” The reality is not so terrifying, apparently, given that Sony Pictures Classics has acquired North American distrib rights for Coppola√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s film — his first in ten years.

The press release doesn’t say when SPC will release Youth Without Youth, but I would figure sometime between late September and mid November. If it doesn’t go to Cannes it’ll certainly go to Toronto.

Coppola wrote, directed, and produced Youth Without Youth, adapting the screenplay from a novella by Romanian author Mircea Eliade.

Pic stars Tim Roth “as Dominic Matei, a professor whose life changes after a cataclysmic incident during the dark years prior to World War II. Becoming a fugitive, he is pursued through far-flung locations including Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India. YWY also stars Alexandra Maria Lara (Downfall), Bruno Ganz (Downfall, The American Friend, Nosferatu), Marcel Lures (Peacemaker, Hart’s War) and Alexandra Pirici. The IMDB page says Matt Damon has a small role of some kind.

In response to the whole appearances issue regarding the Andres Martinez-Kelly Mullen relationship being a seminal factor in producer Brian Grazer being invited to guest-edit the L.A. Times “Current” section, publisher David Hiller has scrapped this coming Sunday’s edition and Martinez, seething and indignant, has resigned. (Click to play song while reading the rest.) “Hiller’s decision to kill the Brian Grazer section this Sunday makes my continued tenure as Los Angeles Times editorial page editor untenable,” he blogged this morning. “The person in this job needs to have an unimpeachable integrity, and Hiller’s decision amounts to a vote of no confidence in my continued leadership.”

I’ve been waiting to read some definitive article in a mainstream publication that repeats what I’m hearing from the guys at West L.A.’s Laser Blazer, and which has been reported on various industry and gamer sites, which is that Blu-ray has surged ahead of HD-DVD and that the aroma of absolute victory is in the air, like the scent of burning leaves on a late-fall afternoon.

Has there been a clear-cut game-is-over, Blu-ray-has-won story in any major publication (Variety, N.Y. Times, Wired, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post) over the last couple of months that I’ve missed? New York Post critic Lou Lumenick has passed along a 3.8.07 story (exactly two weeks ago) that addresses this trend

The thing that did it, apparently, was the selling of two-in-one Blu Ray and Playstation 3 players starting sometime in the middle of last year. As an ign.com story observed last April, “Sony is using the PlayStation 3 to act as something of a Trojan Horse to get players into people’s homes.”

“Spurred in part by the sale of 2 million PlayStation 3 consoles, Sony officials have claimed that, according to research data, cumulative sales of Blu-ray discs have surpassed those for HD-DVD for the first time,” according to a 2.6.07 posting on Gamasutra.com.

“According to Nielsen VideoScan, the consumer research firm for the VHS and DVD sell-through industry, in addition to an overall lead in sales to date, Blu-ray movies outsold those released for the HD-DVD format by more than a 2-to-1 margin during the first week of January. This equates to 47.14 HD DVD titles sold for every 100 Blu-ray titles.

“The report also found that Blu-ray titles outsold HD-DVD releases by nearly a 3-to-1 margin during January’s second week, with 38.36 HD-DVD titles sold for every 100 Blu-ray releases.

“Sony officials also revealed that, according to an online survey of approximately 100,000 current PlayStation 3 owners conducted by the company, 90 percent have watched a Blu-ray movie on their console.

“This high percentage is likely helped by the bundled Talladega Nights Blu-ray disc with the first 500,000 units of PlayStation 3. But even apart from that, 80 percent of those surveyed plan to purchase further Blu-ray movies, while 72 percent of respondents stated that they plan to rent a Blu-ray movie in the near future.”