Fifty Shades of Grey

WARNING: This review is hidden because it reveals the content of the film.
Click here to show this review. Having seen the movie twice, I feel I want to express my feelings about FIFTY SHADES at this point, something I wasn't quite prepared to do on my first viewing. I had to see it in a very focused manner the second time round to come to my conclusions. Foremost, I feel 50 is a love story or will become more of a love story ( I HAVE NOT READ NOR PLAN TO READ ANY OF THE 3 NOVELS) Though I sort of liked the film on a VERY SUPERFICIAL level, I was hardly captivated by the overall results. Great idea that the story is told from the feminine perspective and that the director and writer were females. I thought that would be a blessing! WRONG! Dakota Johnson performs phenomenally well as opposed to Jamie Dornan who is too wooden and stiff ( sorry for the unintentional pun) almost throughout the entire feature. He rather annoyed me with his awkward performance. But writer and director let me down terribly having had so much faith they would do justice to the COMPLETE piece. They did not! Actually, a lot of the screenplay is pretty pathetic and the direction is very iffy to bad!

But all this really amounts to nothing more than a hill of beans when one starts looking at the serious side of FIFTY SHADES and what it represents as a sexual life style, what it truly entails. I can see that there is something budding within the two main characters, but this film is dealing explicitly with the BDSM world and this is where I begin to have very serious problems with the movie. I will aknowledge how difficult it must be to film scenes of such intensity before a room full of males all doing their perspective jobs... but that means precious little to me. I would say that most of the BDSM world is misrepresented in the scenes between Dakota and Jamie, thus doing a huge injustice to this rather substantial sexual world. I've dabbled with BDSM and kinky sex. None of that world rang true to me except for some snippets of Dakota's reactions. It was mere titillation on an infantile level!

Let's get down to brass tax! Dakota is totally naked a great deal of the time yet we do not see her as she should be seen in a bondage chamber.

If the film had been done on HBO, they would have made things quite real and not as if we are inhabiting some sort of fairy tale. Secondly to have the dominant almost NEVER out of his jeans is the most ludicrous aspect of this almost consensual but absurd BDSM relationship. I do know from experience that things don't go in this direction.

Mr. Grey is so very, very poor as a dominant. It just kept bugging me more and more. The perfection of the room, its tidiness, every gadget in its proper orderly place turned everything upside down for me. It made it all look like so much play acting, CHILD'S PLAY. Dornan often refers to the chamber as the play room. And that's what he's good at! Just play acting at whipping and other BDSM hard and fast sex. Except for the final strapping in which we never see belt to butt, the other scenes are so pathetically filmed. This is a man who needs and wants to take FULL control yet he flashes the whip or whatever without any fervor whatsoever, almost like some inexperienced kid though he has been into BDSM since he was fifteen years of age with an older dominatrix. It was all so phony and burdensome! My limited experience told me this was all B. S.

I will concede that Mr. Grey's life is a world of perfection, neatness and order. Thus some will argue that explains his peculiar, ordered dominant role; he's a neat freak which takes over every aspect of his life. NO! In this world, one totally becomes immersed in it, loses all inhibitions and goes at it HARD to use Grey's EXACT term. The place should look like a pig sty by the time a session is over. Rather it appears that two children have been playing their little innocent games within the BIG, BAD, RED of "horrors"!

This was the first taste of FIFTY, somewhat surprised at its unusual blandness, devoid of any real passion whether from a more traditional sexual point of view BUT most certainly from the BDSM life style. I DOUBT THINGS WILL GET ANY BETTER WITH OTHER INSTALLMENTS! Perhaps the books read from a more convincing vantage point. In any case, if it was in the novel, it's all missing in the film. This rather stupid motion picture deserves a " 0 " so I'm forced to give it a " 1 "... AMEN! SKIP parts 2 and 3 and do yourself a favour! Lucky bloke Charlie Hunnam (sp) who was supposed to play Grey but had to drop out due to other commitments! He would have made a more flesh and blood Mr. Grey, perhaps inhabiting all fifty shades!