Good Morning Lowcountry

Movie endings

Saturday night, I walked out on "Hollywoodland." It just seemed to drag on and on with the whodunnit angle and I just ceased to care. If there's any reader out there who has seen this Ben Affleck/Diane Lane/Bob Hoskins/Adrien Brody/Robin Tunney sort-of-noir flick, please tell me: Who killed Superman? Thanks.

Meanwhile, a friend sent me this list of the Top 50 Movie Endings Of All Time.

What, no "Psycho"? "Psycho" not only had a killer (har, har) ending (it wasn't Mother! She's dead in a rocking chair in the basement! It was Norman all along!), it turned movie beginnings on their ear, too. The person we THOUGHT was the main character gets killed in the first 15 minutes... in the shower. Also, no "2001: A Space Odyssey"? OK, nobody understood it, but you gotta admit it was weird.

He'll always be Leonardo to me...

The P&C's Page 1 headline today reads "'Da Vinci' -- a chance to teach or protest." This story is about the raging hype surrounding the movie "The Da Vinci Code."

For GMLc, "Da Vinci" is a chance to EAT POPCORN. Oh, and a chance to get the Renaissance artist's name right. Leonardo was born in Venci, Italy. Da Vinci means "from Vinci", sort of like Da Lowcountry means "from the Lowcountry." But you wouldn't call GMLc only Da Lowcountry, and you wouldn't call Leonardo "Of Venci," although, sigh, people do.

Did Leonardo ever have a last name or has it been lost to time? We couldn't remember, so we looked it up. Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was his name. It means "Leonardo, son of [Mes]ser Piero from Vinci." 15th-century fashion called for first-name use. Michaelangelo, another one-name Renaissance star, was Michaelangelo Buonarroti. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, to be technical. He was born in Caprese. Let's not start calling him Da Caprese. If people like Dan Brown, author of that book and movie, insists on giving Leonardo a last name, that name is Piero.

(Nice beard!)

We're not trying to be curmudgeonly but hearing Leonardo called "Da Vinci" is one of those grating, annoying little things, like people using "would have" when they mean "had." ("If he would have told me his name, I would have gotten it right." Translation: "If he had told me his name, I would have...) Blah, blah. I have my standards, dag-nab-it. I thought "The Leonardo Code" was a great book and read it twice, not for the tortured prose but for the Fibonacci numbers and anagrams and visits to medieval churchs and, you know, plot. Story. Fiction filled with fun facts. Fibonacci, by the way, was also Leonardo. Leonardo Pisano Fibonacci.