Sho, I watched Sean Connery in ‘The Name of the Rose’ tonight. Good thing I wash alone because I had no one’sh time but my own to washte with that plodding beasht of boredom-inshpiring pacing and banal plot.

Still, the movie has its merits. Christian Slater is not one of them. He is now at the top of my list of actors whose presence in the cast will prevent me from watching something. I have since ‘Heathers’ avoided all of his works like the swine flu (Winona Ryder also irks me), but this movie kept gnawing at my consciousness and I decided to put my Slater compunction aside, mostly because it’s one of his (I think) first films … so how obnoxious could he yet be, right?

He was more annoying than anything else in the film, playing the “beautiful” young novice, fancy-boy jackass. Nice tonsure, you douchebag.

Very creepy movie. A lot of grotesques. I know Ron Perlman is a fairly simian-looking, unattractive dude (but I love his work; he’s a fantastic actor), but they made him positively hideous in his role as Salvatore. I’m surprised Dominique Pinon’s mug didn’t pop up somewhere since the film was a rogues gallery of ass-ugly actors.

F. Murray Abraham is in it, and there’s an anus-faced thespian if ever there was.

I was able to get through the film and remain engaged for the most part. I like any movie that exposes the ignorance and hypocrisy of the Catholic church and I love it especially when the righteous cunts get their comeuppances. Still, had I company, this thing wouldn’t have made it halfway through its running time; what a snoozer.

It’s a little staggering to think that an old monk would despise comedy and laughter so much that he would poison the pages of a book, thus leading to the deaths of many of his brethren … though there was also a suicide resulting from homosexual guilt (the gay sex act apparently inspired by a thirst for academic knowledge related to the forbidden comic text … ha!), and it’s nice to see that Umberto Ecco didn’t shy away from the kind of behavior that had to have been absurdly commonplace in a monastery.

I think it requires a degree of mental illness for a man to consign himself to a life of poverty and “chastity” with no one else for company but other addle-minded men. Monastic life must have been a magnet for homosexuals. But I guess places like Chelsea didn’t exist back then …

It’s despicable that society works so hard to shame people into feeling guilty over impulses that don’t necessarily have to result in the harm of another person, driving them to repress their urges and castigate or even flagellate themselves, and obviously fail to overcome a trait that inherently defines who they are. But it was the 14th century … so criticizing social mores of then is a bit ridiculous since hatred of homosexuals is still pretty firmly entrenched in 21st-century society.

Still, a monastery sounds pretty much like hell, to me.

Tags: 'Heathers', 'The Name of the Rose', Dominique Pinon, F. Murray Abraham, Ron Perlman, Sean Connery, Umberto Ecco

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 11:38 PM and is filed under entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.