A Beautiful Fraud

I know I have to get over this because it's only going to get worse when The Da Vinci Code finally hits theaters on May 19, but let me vent just this once and then I promise to shut up about it. The man's name is Leonardo da Vinci. Now you can call him Leonardo, or you can call him Leonardo da Vinci. You can even call him Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, which is his full birth name. You cannot, however, call him "Da Vinci." Not ever. "Da Vinci" literally means "from Vinci," which is where he was born. It's not his surname. Leonardo didn't have one. So referring to him as "Da Vinci" would be like saying "from Stupid Town" if your name happens to be, oh, I don't know, "Dan Brown from Stupid Town." Every time I see that trailer with Tom Hanks in that ridiculous haircut gasping "Da Vinci!" I wish my drunken art-history professor was still around to make good on his promise to pound the snot out of the next person who says "Da Vinci" instead of "Leonardo." You'd think after making a kajillion dollars by turning the man's life and legacy into a crap book Mr. Brown would at least get the guy's name right.

Did anyone else catch that really entertaining piece about Werner Herzog in last week's New Yorker (yes, the New Yorker)? I know Herzog is generally considered to be one of the great auteurs of European cinemah-blah-blah, but the guy just plain cracks me up. I mean, here's a guy who got shot while doing press for Grizzly Man, and when British journalist Mark Kermode suggested they skedaddle, Herzog insisted on finishing the interview, saying "It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid." (You can catch the whole interview, shot and all, here.) And this comes only two days after Herzog pulled Joaquin Phoenix from the wreckage after the Walk the Line star's car flipped over on a canyon road near Sunset. Simply put, the guy rocks. Hard. Not to mention the fact that Herr Herzog's currently at the top of his game: His recent documentary output, particularly Grizzly Man and The White Diamond, has been top-notch. Well according to the New Yorker article, "How Werner Herzog Makes Movies," Herzog is now in the jungles of Thailand with Christian Bale working on a feature-film version of Herzog's great 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Entitled Rescue Down, it's about a German-American pilot's harrowing ordeal after being shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War, and from the sound of things, the production itself has turned into quite a quagmire. As the New Yorker piece succinctly puts it, Herzog is caught between two groups of people: Those who came to the jungles thinking they were making a Werner Herzog film, and those who — like strip-club-owner-turned-producer Steve Marlton, whose Gibraltar Entertainment is also responsible for something called Bottoms Up! with Paris Hilton — thought they were getting something like The Rundown, only starring Christian Bale instead of The Rock. No one's getting paid, Herzog's ADs are quitting left and right, and the Hollywood crew is convinced that the director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo knows nothing about making movies and are reshooting scenes behind the master's back, often with disastrous results. It's all almost too good to be true: I can only hope that someone like Les Blank, who shot the documentary Burden of Dreams during the production of Herzog's beautiful folly Fitzcarraldo, is getting it all down on tape.

Just caught the trailer for Poseidon on the Warner Bros. website, and I've gotta admit: I'm intrigued. I should also mention that I grew up during the heyday of disaster movies and was weaned on a steady diet of tidal waves, towering infernos, killer bees, Sensurround and Karen Black. (When I was 12, I even made my own Super-8 earthquake epic by shaking a table and setting fire to my train set.) So I was initially skeptical about a remake of such a seminal '70s experience as The Poseidon Adventure, but I figure if anyone's going to do it, it should be Wolfgang Petersen: His Das Boot still ranks as the greatest trapped-underwater adventure of all time. (If you haven't seen this claustophobic classic, now is the perfect time: Columbia Home Video just released the original unedited version on DVD). Screenwriter Mark Protosevich is also an interestingly unconventional choice. As loopy as his script for The Cell might have been, it was entertaining, and he currently has two adaptations in production that have definitely caught my attention: John Carter of Mars, based on the first book in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian series, and yet another version of Richard Matheson's classic end-of-the-world zombie vampire opus, I Am Legend, previously officially filmed as The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man. Jon Favreau's directing John Carter; it looks like Constantine's Francis Lawrence is slated to direct Legend (Ridley Scott was one of the original directors attached to the project); and I'll definitely go see both.

I don't know about you, but I was about blue in the face waiting to hear what Brits count as their favorite — sorry, favourite — song lyric. Well, I can finally breathe again. According to those indefatigable pollsters at VH1, Britain's best-loved bit of pop poesy comes from U2's "One," that stirring ode to global community (although my pal John McP tells me that it's really about the bitter dissolution of the Edge's marriage) that goes a little something like this: "One life, with each other, sisters, brothers." What a lovely thought. But it seems not everyone in the U.K. feels so we-are-the-world-so-let's-start-givin' when it comes to what's on their personal playlists. Coming in at a fairly close No. 2 is a line from The Smiths "How Soon Is Now?", that vibrato-crazy masterpiece of self-pitying, me-me-me Morrissey misery that can be heard on soundtracks as diverse as The Wedding Singer, The Craft, Charmed and the trailer for Dario Argento's bizarre Phantom of the Opera. Heck, it was even covered by those pseudo-Sapphic-sisters in t.A.T.u. (remember t.A.T.u.?): "So you go and you stand on your own/And you leave on your own/And you go home and you cry and you want to die." Well put, Moz. Who can think about connecting with the world at large when you can't even manage to hook up at a gay bar?

Note to self: No more two-week vacations — ever! Exhausted from 10 days of bionic-power tourism and the best efforts on the part of Air France to make every connecting flight a living, screaming nightmare, I'm a wee bit jet-lagged and now facing two weeks of back work. But who's complaining? I was lucky enough to spend the time somewhere I'd never been before: Florence. It's just as beautiful as it's cracked up to be, but not nearly as movie crazy as one might expect in a town so deeply devoted to such lesser arts as painting, sculpture and architecture. Traces, however, can be found in the strangest places. Directly in the shadow of the glorious Ponte Vecchio — surely one of the most famous bridges in the world — stand the ruins of something called Cinema X, a theater advertising movies por adulti soltanto: for adults only. Sadly, Cinema X seems to have gone the way of the Medici, but I did manage to catch the totally cool “Omaggio a Sergio Leone,” which is being held as part of the Firenze Film Festival in the medieval belly of the hulking Palazzo Vecchio. For a mere fistful of euro — three, to be exact — I got to gaze upon costumes and props used in such Sergio Leone classics as Once Upon a Time in America ("We've got a suit worn by Roberto De Niro!", the ticket seller was sure to tell me in the same hushed, reverential tone Italians usually reserve for the pope) and was treated to a video projection of The Colossus of Rhodes, screened, along with other Leone faves, in a little makeshift theater. The festival is running until April 25, so if you're lucky enough to find yourself in Florence in the next week or so, definitely check it out.