Christian tries to win Anastasia by buying her things (a car, a new wardrobe) and paying her things (attention, respect). Christian, a dreamboat in conservative coiffure and couture, is a 50-year dreamboat throwback: a generic James Bond, or Hugh Hefner’s early Playboy man, whose essential accessories included sleek cars, well-chosen wines and a stock of beautiful women. Hence this Fifty Shades of Pale Grey, which underlines the filmmakers’ intuition that this is less a sex tale than a love story.ġ0. Many theaters would not show a scrupulous adaptation fewer people would pay to see it. Why is it rated R, not NC-17? For the reason most things are what they are in Hollywood: greed.
But the E L James readership presumably wanted to see writhing, walloped bodies in the movie.
Besides, they don’t need simulated sex in a theater they can see the real thing for free, online at home.ĩ. They laugh nervously or contemptuously, to prove their superiority to the urgent intensity on screen. Watching people make love is not participatory but nakedly voyeuristic everyone in the auditorium feels weird. Shortly thereafter ( Star Wars), cinema reverted to a kids’ medium and trained audiences to want only spectacle and sensation: action epics, horror films, rowdy comedies - circuses. Back then, films strove mightily to be as mature and confrontational as novels and theater and a movie house was the only place that a group of strangers could find public connection to erotic ecstasy and anguish. Mark Rylance took the Brando role, and Kerry Fox the Schneider, in the more sexually explicit art-house drama Intimacy in 2001.Ĩ. Once in a while such a story connects becomes a film sensation, as when Marlon Brando toyed with Maria Schneider in an unfurnished Paris hotel room in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. Sadomasochistic romance ought to be a burgeoning movie genre, because it touches on the power vectors in any relationship, and because each person frequently switches roles of dominant and submissive: you’re on top, you give in. Creating a genteel R-rated film from a very X-rated book is like making a Mamma Mia! movie without the songs.ħ. But the lovemaking is mostly tender, canoodling, cuddling. Johnson and Dornan spend plenty of time undressed (she fully nude, he topless but rarely trouserless or towelless) there are spankings and just a soupçon of wicked whiplash. Gone is James’s careless jargon Anastasia doesn’t keep saying “Holy crap!” Diminished, degraded or simply hinted at are The Big Scenes. It’s as if the filmmakers didn’t care much for the book’s literary lapses and dramatic excesses, and set out to make a solidly ethereal romance about a smart girl who realizes her strength when she meets a lost boy eager to fill her power vacuum.Ħ. The movie, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and scripted by Kelly Marcel, is just the opposite. The result had all the fidelity and floridity of fan fiction. James (real name: Erika Mitchell) tweaked the Twilight teen virgin Bella Swan into the slightly older Anastasia, and reimagined sensitive vampire Edward as the well-mannered sadist Christian. My early curiosity built to a cozy level of admiration, then drifted off into ennui.ĥ. And not to bury the lede any deeper, I’ll say while watching Fifty Shades I kept waiting to tumble into derision but never got there. Among the early reviews, the critics are split between favorable and dismissive. “Mom has some shopping to do” - for fantasies of romance and submission, whips and wisdom.Ĥ. For some, it’s a hearts-and-floggers date movie: A couple attends the movie, then he asks, “Dinner or my Red Room of Pain?” And mothers in the mall, they’ll tell their kids to go back and see the SpongeBob SquarePants movie another time-and-a-half. The Fifty Shades of Grey film opens in a double-whammy four days - Valentine’s Day in the middle of Presidents’ Day weekend - and is expected to stoke a $90-million windfall.
Inspired by the young adult Twilight series, James wrote for Actual Adults: women, mostly, to whose wishes, feats and dreams the risky romance of Ana and Christian spoke.ģ. A hundred million copies sold! And apparently it’s the lowest form of prose fiction - less literature than shiterature - with the enticement of gaudy bondage-and-discipline scenes.
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