Let’s get something out of the way: Fifty Shades of Grey is not a good movie.

You can watch these shows in the privacy of your own home right now! And you won’t even need that fast-forward button.ĭanielle’s rating: 3 handcuffs out of 10. There, quality shows like (among others) The Americans, Outlander, The Mindy Project, Masters of Sex, The Fall (starring a much better, and bearded, Dornan), Orphan Black and How to Get Away with Murder all feature strong, sexually unapologetic women, as well as plenty of shirtless men. In fact, if you’re looking for the female gaze, you’ll have to search the small screen. And while Jamie Dornan’s abs (and arse) get trotted out a decent amount, most of director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s camera is trained firmly on Dakota Johnson’s body, which doesn’t feel especially transgressive, either. So it’s curious that, on screen, we never actually see Ana have an orgasm. In that Red Room and outside it, Ana always comes first. What did feel new-or at least newer-was Fifty Shades’ insistence on female pleasure. It’s not where Christian enjoys his sexual predilection-it’s where he performs his sexual pathology. But there’s nothing transgressive at all about that Red Room. There’s the obvious stuff about how a moody man can be saved by the tender love of a good woman (Edward Rochester had an attic wife long before Christian Grey had a Red Room of Pain). For all its flirtation with BDSM, Fifty Shades struck me as an enormously traditional book. But only because you’ll have the advantage of a fast-forward button. We were in it for the racy bits! And-very likely-skipped straight past everything that wasn’t the racy bits! In the lead up to the release of this film, people wondered if titillated viewers would favour the privacy of their own homes over the public theatre. That’s not a surprise: The book isn’t much interested in conventions like “plot” or “dialogue that doesn’t make you physically ill,” and it doesn’t need to be, because not a single one of the 100 million worldwide readers opened that book for its literary merit. This movie is, almost to a minute, cripplingly dull. In the end, it was my attention span that took the hardest beating during Fifty Shades of Grey.

Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey.

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