C.J. Foxx Movie House Review #5: Fifty Shades of Grey

Holy Crap!  This is exactly why I love writing, and why I love my new writing lifestyle.  Never in a skillion years, would I ever go to this flick under my own accord.   Because of my new circle of friends, and my new existence, I found myself doing the icebucket challenge of movie reviews.  Attending this showing, I felt like that one, singular dude in a yoga class or Meathead Rob Lowe with Cable.  During every second of the night the young ladies in this 100% female audience refused to take this seriously, giggling and gabbing (Actually, in many instances, making this better).  I wondered about Charlie Hunnam and how he was the original cast as Christian Grey, because my loving sister has a serious crush on him, drooling over his days as Jackson Teller from Sons of Anarchy.  I was more into Venus Van Damme but to each their own.  

This movie is 50 shades of Beautiful. The sets and cinematography are ravishing.  They accented the 'grey' nature of Seattle in the opening shots of the picture and didn't let up with any of the other locations they visited throughout.  Seattle is now on my list as a place I want to visit on vacation, even if they require you to compost your trash if more than 10% of it is food.

A detail I noticed was that every person who associated with Christian Grey had blonde hair (except for two people, his mother and our female Protagonist Anastasia Steele).  Between Dakota Johnson’s character name, the fluke that she works in a hardware shop, where it’s a bondage cornucopia, I had understood how the book version could use this to its advantage.  The movie, on the other hand, the way they chose to convey all of this and the timing of the dialogue was so laughable.

If I had to point the blame, the problems lie primarily on the script.  It wasn’t how the words were delivered, it was the words themselves.  It turned this movie from a possibly bold, controversial and sophisticated piece of art into a flimsy, flavor of the week, gimmick.  So like in every other “chick flick” the leads single, a sexually liberated roommate Kate and Grey’s driver, Taylor owned moments of needed comic relief.  Jamie Dornan took some horribly plotted dialogue, doing what he could with it.  Handsome and looking all decked out in some nice costumes/suits I thought how it may have different with Jax Teller, looking equally as swag.  Regardless, no one could save this joke.

Dakota Johnson still climbs higher a star, her talents as an actress shined through the dilapidated and seemingly broken project.  How ironic that her mother, Melanie Griffith, was in rather sexual explicit roles herself at a younger age.  She was doing provocative nude scenes at age 17 in movies such as Night Moves and The Drowning Pool.  Her breakout role was in an underrated Gem called Body Double (aka the film Brian De Palma did after Scarface) in which she portrayed porn star Holly Body.  I saw many moments where Crockett’s Daughter had the same looks as her mother

This film reminded me of another sexual explicit film from the 80s called 9 and a 1/2 weeks. The plots are near mirror images of each other where the innocent and sexually inexperienced woman meets a mysterious gentleman, turning her into a submissive… reluctant until she warms up to his hidden exploits.  Eventually he pushed her past her boundaries, and she splits.  Fifty shades dove deeper into the bondage world but the films had the same feel.

Fifty shades was too worried about pushing the sex scene envelope, but should’ve shelved one of them to explore a little more of who these people were.  I was kinda bored waiting for the final shoe to drop... An extremely sexy billionaire dude rolls into town, because he’s so rich and powerful, he’s the guest speaker at your commencement ceremony.  He chooses this random, hardware shop working girl, showing off his toys and his crazy top secret “eyes wide shut” kind of hobby.  Everybody is screwed up, especially behind closed doors, you know what helps look the other way…? a bottle of Dom in your private jet, that turns into a yacht, that turns into a space shuttle.

In the end this film was a piece of trash and basically an exploitation of the book that grabbed the fascination of many and falls short of this film’s predecessors.  Go out and see this one, live a little, get spanked.  I give this one 3 and a half out of 10 possible Catwoman whips “Mee-ow”.

C.J. Foxx 

Author of Super-Hero Bowl VI
@CJFoxxAuthor on Twitter
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http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GGTL79M