Sketchbook: Whole Lotta Rosy

I read The Name of the Rose again recently, which prompted me to look out the film on YouTube. I liked a lot of it - particularly the convincingly squalid medieval atmosphere, and it was a very pleasant surprise to see F. Murray Abraham booming and sweeping in and out of rooms as dread inquisitor Bernardo Gui - but a lot of it was pants, particularly the daft ending. And it was the wrong kind of labyrinth entirely. It might as well have had a dragon in it.

The cast were a singularly grotesque lot, with the chiseled exception of Sean Connery. This made them very interesting to draw, apart from Christian Slater as novice Adso of Melk, who has a single default expression of open-mouthed confusion/bewilderment throughout the film. Also, he had an American accent, as did his older-self voiceover narrator, which I found irrationally irritating because by the time Columbus left port for the first time Adso would have been about 180 years old.