#i also suspect grant morrison is keen on this movie

[cantsayidont]

THE NAME OF THE ROSE (1986): Long, disappointingly unfocused, frequently unappetizing adaptation of the Umberto Eco novel, starring Sean Connery as the impishly named Brother William of Baskerville, a highly intellectual Franciscan monk of the 13th century who visits a Benedictine monastery with his young novice Adso (Christian Slater), hoping to find a mundane explanation for a series of mysterious deaths before the Church sends in an inquisitor (F. Murray Abraham) to look for demonic scapegoats.

It starts off well, but it loses focus on the mystery with an extended late second-act shift into the evils of the Inquisition and schisms in the Church, which so derails the plot that the movie never recovers, rendering the eventual solution to the mystery something of a damp squib. Connery is marvelous — he makes William's powers of ratiocination entirely convincing, and his avuncular mentor relationship with Adso (which I have a feeling George Lucas watched with attention in writing the STAR WARS prequels) is appealing — but the still-gawky teenage Slater is terrible, the only significant female character (a horny peasant girl played by Valentina Vargas) never gets a name and has hardly any dialogue, and almost every character other than William and Adso is presented as a kind of Tod Browning grotesque — in particular a young and very hammy Ron Perlman as a mentally challenged hunchback named Salvatore who speaks in a weird pidgin of different languages. After a while, I found it increasingly hard to take, and the ending was unrewarding. CONTAINS LESBIANS? The characters are aware that gay people exist, but no. VERDICT: Almost worth it just for Connery, but by about the 90-minute mark, it feels like he's trying to hold back the tide.