Throw in some sand and maybe an oil fire and the Jarhead premiere is just... like... Iraq! (Photo: STV)

The Reeler broke off its weekend a little early to visit Sunday night's Jarhead premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater. The last time I was there, of course, I got in on the cuter-than-cute Younger Family Red-Carpet Reunion. This time, the closest thing we got to a reunion was a verrrrrry low-profile Jeff Katzenberg talking shop with Kate Winslet, whose husband Sam Mendes turned in Dreamworks' Oscar-winning American Beauty in 1999 and, now, this fall's Jarhead for Universal.

Was Katzenberg there to support Mendes, or was he test-driving the Universal Pictures premiere apparatus that Dreamworks might be getting familiar with in the years ahead? Like I said, the guy was not really there to talk with me.

Mendes, on the other hand, was his usual gentlemanly self, and despite his work with all these hot leading men (Jamie Foxx showed up, like, 30 seconds before the Uni logo popped on-screen) and his marriage to a hot leading lady, all I really wanted to know about was how he adjusted to shooting his first feature without Conrad Hall. The genius cinematographer died in early 2003 and was replaced on Jarhead by another non-slouch, Roger Deakins.

"I miss Conrad a lot, mostly as a friend," Mendes told me. "But what I loved about this was that Roger and he were very close. Roger learned a lot from Conrad, and if ever there was a chance to work in a different way without Conrad, this was it. I wanted a handheld camera and to work in a more organic way, and that enabled me to do it. Roger's an operator also, you know."

Well, I do now. But what I do not know--what I just cannot figure out for the life of me--is what is up with Jarhead's poster. I mean, think what you want of American Beauty, but its poster is up there with Pulp Fiction and maybe one or two others as perhaps the most indelible posters of the 1990s. Now we have Jarhead--starring quintessential poster boys Foxx and Jake Gyllenhaal--with its Full Metal Jacket ripoff subbing a dogtag for a helmet and a colloquial tagline connoting "war" with "suck." Mendes did not have anything to do with this, did he?

"Actually, yeah, I did," he replied. "What? You don't like it?"

Well, no. If it is between a naked woman in rose petals and a dogtag, the woman wins out 10 times out of 10. We have got to get back, you know--

"Back to the sex?"

OK, if you say so.

"All right," he shrugged. "Well, maybe for the next movie."

About which I was planning to ask Mendes when he was snatched away into the bowels of the klieg-singed Ziegfeld. Such is life. Maybe he took it up with Katzenberg--I hear the guy is kind of connected.