A Year of Garbage Movies #94, “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015)
When I was in middle school, we had this wooden ladder bolted to the wall that we used as monkey bars. One time I fell off halfway across and after I picked myself up, I stared at my hands like they were the ones at fault for this. I basically did the same thing after I clicked the “play” button for Fifty Shades of Grey.
This was the first movie on the list that I was actually worried about. Nonetheless, I decided I was going to try and put all the memes aside and give this movie a fair chance. After all I had just witnessed Brendan Fraser pinned inside of an automatic car window, screaming “PLEASE SIR MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?!” while being sprayed repeatedly by a skunk so I figured that would ease me into the world of S&M depicted in Fifty Shades.
However, things did not get off to a great start. In all honesty, I’ve been using kind of a crutch up to this point. I’ve been watching these god-awful movies at 2x speed and using subtitles to make sure I don’t actually miss any dialogue. H̵o̵w̵e̵v̵e̵r̵ ̵t̵h̵i̵s̵ ̵b̵e̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵ ̵S̵U̵P̵E̵R̵ ̵U̵N̵R̵A̵T̵E̵D̵ ̵B̵A̵L̵L̵-̵S̵L̵A̵P̵P̵I̵N̵G̵ ̵D̵I̵R̵E̵C̵T̵O̵R̵’̵S̵ ̵C̵U̵T̵ ̵v̵e̵r̵s̵i̵o̵n̵,̵ ̵t̵h̵e̵r̵e̵ ̵w̵e̵r̵e̵ ̵n̵o̵ ̵O̵p̵e̵n̵S̵u̵b̵t̵i̵t̵l̵e̵s̵ ̵a̵v̵a̵i̵l̵a̵b̵l̵e̵.̵ ̵A̵l̵l̵ ̵2̵ ̵h̵o̵u̵r̵s̵ ̵a̵n̵d̵ ̵8̵ ̵m̵i̵n̵u̵t̵e̵s̵ ̵o̵f̵ ̵t̵h̵i̵s̵ ̵w̵e̵r̵e̵ ̵g̵o̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵t̵o̵ ̵u̵n̵f̵o̵l̵d̵ ̵i̵n̵ ̵e̵x̵c̵r̵u̵c̵i̵a̵t̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵r̵e̵a̵l̵-̵t̵i̵m̵e̵.̵ OH HOSANNA I FOUND SUBTITLES! 2.5 SPEED HERE I COME!
Within the first 10 minutes my abdominal muscles started to ache from the cringe. Were it not for the subtitles and the sweet release of watching the movie on fast-forward, my stomach likely would have imploded into a neutron star of half-digested Chik-fil-a and second-hand embarrassment.
If you go into this completely blind, you might believe that the movie is about a collection of squirrels in a Jamie Dornan skin-suit trying to learn to act human. Within the first few minutes he attributes his success to being a people-person, but proceeds to act as if he’s still learning how to use his vocal cords and read social cues. In most scenes, he seems to be staring at a growth protruding from the top of Dakota Johnson’s skull. Keep in mind that this is our first real introduction to the character, and he basically just reads off his Tinder profile.
Dakota Johnson’s character is introduced with superb subtlety, allowing us to explore her character’s development and I’m just making things up she gets her character is introduced in the same way.
The weird exposition-interview would be a lot less irritating if they didn’t have the same scene again at a coffee shop 5 minutes later. I guess they hoped the audience would forget by injecting a scene in the hardware store where Ana works. Grey shows up and inexplicably asks if she was in the Girl Scouts because she managed to cut a rope. Then again he also seems impressed that she knows masking tape comes in different widths so I guess that remark isn’t that surprising. After going through the complete list of other male characters we’ve been introduced to so far and assuring him that none are her boyfriend, they meet up and he tells her to go away or something. Honestly at this point I started watching the movie in 5 minute increments so the order is a bit hazy. I just remember there was the requisite “best friend with obvious unrequited love for the leading lady” that we meet briefly. It is telegraphed that he will be a douche-bag later on so that Christian Grey can look relatively normal for 5 seconds in front of Anastasia.
Basically after kind of rejecting Grey’s advances and expensive gifts (in case you forgot he was rich), she goes out drinking and calls him to tell him off or something. Somehow he traces exactly which bar she’s at because money. The dude in the friend-zone regalia from earlier keeps trying to kiss her so Christian shows up just in time to shout “NO MEANS NO” and pull him off of her, which is kind of ironic because this whole movie is predicated on his iffy relationship with consent. She then wakes up in his hotel room and takes some pills he left out for her without a second thought. Keep in mind that this is after he both tracked her down from a cellphone call and she helped him restock his serial killer supply kit.
If I go through the entire movie and point out every terrible thing I’d need my own server in Medium’s data-center so I’ll stop with the play-by-play. However, this is the point in the movie where actual sexual content is shown and I would be remiss if I didn’t share some of the suffering I endured with everyone.
Here we return to the theme of squirrels in a Jamie Dornan suit. Shocked that Ana is a virgin, Christian Grey decides to “rectify” the situation. What follows isn’t sex per se; it’s more like:
- quite a bit of open-mouthed hovering. In several scenes he tries to fog up her torso like a window he’s about to write his name on.
- Staring into her belly-button, as if the squirrels operating him are trying to reach a consensus on how human anatomy is supposed to work and put his body into “hibernate” mode.
- Paperwork
The paperwork that he makes all of his partners sign seems to be the writer’s way of really trying to drive home the fact that he’s not a sociopath or a rapist.
Pros:
- We don’t hear what Ana is thinking in the movie, so we are entirely free of stupid metaphors and references to her “inner goddess”
- The characters just read off their personality traits like it’s their Pokedex entry several times early in the movie, so you don’t really need to focus at all. For further assistance, each character’s appearance is also a convenient short-hand for whatever archetype they are to fit.
- Everything else aside, this probably has the most production quality of any of the movies I’ve had to watch so far.
Cons:
- They somehow managed to create a movie entirely about sex that is also boring. For people who would like to watch a better version of the same basic premise, I might recommend Secretary (2002)
- Christian Grey presumably makes all of his partners sign this gigantic stack of paperwork that entails their contract. Not only is this ecologically unfriendly, but it would have been a perfect use for the blockchain. The money the film could have made from the product placement could have been used for a better writer or at least some more squirrels to operate the Dornan suit.
