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Because You Asked For It, Is Why
By popular demand: my review of Fifty Shades Darker. Warning: Spoilers, Dirty Stuff.
This is the second installment of the Fifty Shades of Grey series, with The Boy Billionaire Who Has Time for All Kinds of Bull[expletive] and The Girl Who Puts On Five Percent Too Much Lipstick. So, it’s no Empire Strikes Back. I’m putting this here because some people evidently thought this was worth reading for the sexy foodie sex stuff. They do eat a few salads and things, but it’s not like this is a food erotica movie. There is one food preparation scene. They go grocery shopping. They bring the food back to make dinner. He’s cutting up a bell pepper and she leans across him in a suggestive way a couple of times. Now if this were a movie from the ’40s, and we hadn’t already seen these two do a dozen weird, kinky things in the first installment, there might have been some energy, some sparks. But it’s just dull and dead.
Also, it’s weird how he cuts up the bell pepper. I wonder if this was a conscious choice on the part of Jamie Dornan, because he hacks it up so clumsily that I thought a cut-finger-blood-drinking scene was coming, but no, he gets through the bell pepper okay. Is he trying to depict The Billionaire as someone who doesn’t do little things like that for himself? I dunno. Then they do the sex and she wakes him up and says there’s nothing but cold stir-fry for breakfast. Which is stupid because they went grocery shopping and she totally could have gotten some eggs or something.
At one point he asks her to marry him, but she’s not so sure because he still seems kind of attached to all these crazy ex-lovers.
The movie is punctuated, like the first one, with their hasty sex attacks. Somehow this girl is just always ready in like 40-50 seconds, because if he took the time to actually warm her up — like they do in real porn movies — this thing would be either three hours or they would have to cut out all the character development, which would make it a porn movie, which it isn’t because there’s a lot of profound character development, and you don’t see The Bratwurst. Through these two movies, and I assume also in the third one, they’ve gone through, like in gymnastics and figure skating, The Compulsories. Though the arc is not consistent — there are toys and things in this one that are kind of a step back in terms of kinkiness to less-advanced stuff than what they did in the first one. More explicit than that I cannot be. Also, she’s still naïve about a lot of these machines and stuff, which even all the high school girls I hang out with on Facebook know at least a little bit about, because in these movies they don’t have Google. And everybody drives Audis. Apparently they’re the kinkiest cars.
This movie is a little darker, as the title implies. Two of Christian Grey’s former lovers come back to haunt him. One is a submissive of his who went off the deep end. She keeps popping up in Ana’s life and eventually shows up in her apartment with a gun. Christian and his driver Taylor disarm her in a ridiculously slow and mechanical scene. The other is the older woman who turned him onto the weird sex years ago. The dope on her (Kim Basinger, 9-1/2 Weeks, LOL) is that she was the dominant one and really, really hurt poor Christian. And there’s Anastasia’s jilted boss, who’s all obsessed with her. These add a little portentous drama, then are swept away, and then reappear. With no real rhyme or reason.
As in the first movie, the actors are trying really hard to make this crap work. Everything is beautifully lit, and composed, and the scenery and sets are magnificent. If only it were in another language with no subtitles.
Because all the dialogue here is on-the-nose. It feels like hours and hours of exposition. The only thing that keeps it moving is these jerky leaps from scene to scene. It’s kind of like a two-hour soap opera in that way. Except we’re not jumping between several intertwined stories, we just have to jump from masked ball to street scene to sex scene to sailboat scene to get these two to stop talking about things that no one ever talks about this way in real life. This rapidity becomes comical when he flies with his assistant in his helicopter from Seattle to Portland for a snap meeting and crashes in the forest near Mt. St. Helens on the way home. All of his family and friends are in his penthouse watching this on the news like an hour later, thinking he’s dead or something, and then they break into the news and he’s been found alive! “Hooray!” they say. Then he walks right out of the elevator! How did he get back so fast?! He has a cut on his head but that’s about it. Everyone cheers and they all leave him and Anastasia together alone to, well, you know.
She tells him yes to his proposal and they do it in his red room.
The next day he has a big birthday party, and everyone celebrates, and there are fireworks, and Anastasia’s bitter angry boss watches from across the lagoon as the fireworks go off. So I’m sure there will be plenty of plodding “drama” in the third one.
I have to say, Jason, that I wasn’t much interested in this review at first. But gradually I found myself becoming somewhat interested. Then more interested. Then extremely interested. And then suddenly I lost interest.
Really well written.
lol… dude, why did you do this to yourself? did the audience at least laugh out loud at some of the absurd moments?
@nandapanjandrum I agree that in conservative and especially religious circles the visceral sexual elements of male and female attraction are downplayed. I think that it is a reaction to the overexposure of sexuality in society. I don’t think it is wise or healthy to only focus on the emotional aspect of relationships. An honest discussion of the natural sexual elements should also be included as it is a complimentary part of the equation.
I do it for Ricochet, because I love Ricochet.
It was a 3:55 pm showing in Bountiful UT on a Sunday, so….yeah, the audience…there were seven of us. One M/F couple and two F/F couples, who looked like friends or maybe mother/daughter. I dunno. It was dark.
Audiences behave completely differently when they’re tiny like that, so I don’t have any conclusions.
So far it’s brought in $146M on a $55M budget; the original did $547/40M. The book is, by certain measures, the best-selling novel of all time. So there’s definitely some kind of cultural phenomenon going on here. But I still remain kind of puzzled by it.
Thanks.
Great and hilarious review. Better than the first book that started it all!
Thanks.
I’m confident this review is better than the movie. Thanks for the giggles.
Might need to get your retroactive take on the Twilight series……as far as I can tell they are 50 Shades of Grey for 12 year old girls or something….
More to the point, 50 Shades of Grey started life as a fan writing her own version of Twilight, which is indeed emotional porn for women. (i.e. a boring, plain girl with no personality will end up with two sexy men utterly devoted to her for no more reason than the cheerleaders want to have sex with the pizza boy in cliché real porn)
@amyschley Perfect encapsulation of the 50 Shades of Gray & other romance novels. This is something that men need to understand about this phenomenon. Its not that your wife is suddenly into S&M, nope she is getting emotional porn from the trope theme.
Source: Adam Ellis and Buzzfeed
Hmm… How about turning the fifty shades of stupid dialog Seussian?
This started as @judgemental‘s idea, and sorta snowballed from there:
This sounds like a twisted love triangle, with Judge and I trying to outkink Midge and win her dominance.
See? Twisted. That is, fifty shades darker…
As of now, the poem ends with the electrical engineer winning, I’d note.
Given the way Skip framed the contest, I think I can live with that.
I would quibble slightly here. I think there is an aspect in relationships, magnified and distorted in S&M, that is appealing to women — specifically, the ability to be passive and out of control. The modern woman is preached at from practically birth that being a woman means that she must be aggressive and assertive, that women who defer to men in any way are traitors to the sex. Our marriages aren’t supposed to be a leader and a follower; they’re supposed to be a perfectly equal union of two perfect equals.
I think women just get tired of it, and in this day and age, the S&M kink is the most acceptable way for a woman to say, “It’s okay dear, you can be in charge tonight.”
Sad, if so…
Granted, but I willing to bet that the average household that buys a blindfold or handcuffs to “spice things up” uses them about as often as the average household uses their treadmill.
Me, too, now that you mention it…
I’ll bet fans often describe themselves as feeling “bored” or “empty.” It’s really sad to see young people becoming so jaded and lonely that they need to jumpstart themselves with this kind of stuff. After a while, it won’t do the trick, either. What happens when you arrive at adulthood already disbelieving in romance, and burned out on cheap thrills? Is there any hope of companionship for them?
Well if that’s not a buzz kill…….
My sister’s husband bought a treadmill years ago and as we made our way down to the basement on a recent visit she told me that “he still uses it every single day . . .
. . . to hang his shirts on,” she sighed, as the glorified laundry rack came into view.
Most sex among youths is still “old fashioned” romantic-relationship stuff. I don’t know if that’s exactly a consolation, of course. But at any rate, for young women, believing that they’re in love, or “in relationship”, is still the biggest sex risk. (By contrast, cynically disbelieving in romance, at least until it’s time to settle down and find a spouse, is a handy excuse for maintaining one’s virginity.)
Generally, young women do seem to get more burnt out the more sexual partners they accumulate, but perhaps what happens is that their hopes of companionship are raised (after all, sex should cement companionship, right?), then dashed (upon discovering that the cement didn’t hold) repeatedly. It may be the dashed hopes of companionship are what do the most damage. (The few girls who do seem naturally wired to “tomcat around” don’t seem to suffer as much by comparison.)
Many readers of Fifty Shades stuff are older – 30 and up. Among younger women (<25), though, apparently reading the stuff is correlated with unhealthier sexual behaviors, but it’s not clear which way the causality goes. Are they so lonely that they need to jumpstart themselves, so jaded that they need cheap thrills, or are they consoling themselves with fantasies where toxic relationships are portrayed as ultra-romantic as an escape from the heartbreak of their own regrets?
*coffee spit take* Bountiful? On a Sunday? The movie theaters are open? What is this world coming to? Get thee to Rexburg where such nonsense is not tolerated.
~ Boise native
Actually, I’ll be up there in a couple weeks.
I agree, and it’s a real shame. I feel sorry for these college kids with their stupid contracts promising to “ask permission” for every step (“May I kiss you?” – “May I touch the top of your left boob?” Way to take the pleasure out of it ya dumbasses). I, however, feel no need for bondage (don’t even try it, Buster). Merely being manly and backing me up against the wall will suffice.
Like! 8-)
Duly noted.
And that is why you’re the best Ricochet boyfriend.