So you have to hand it to director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Kelly Marcel for making a film that, while not as titillating as the book, is a much better adaptation than the source material deserves. Millions of readers paid their dues, skimming countless boring scenes with a narrator who says nothing more profound than “holy cow!” and “double crap!” so they could get to the good stuff: bondage-laced sex scenes between the story’s innocent protagonist and her impossibly hot, impossibly rich damaged-goods love interest. James’s best-selling book “ Fifty Shades of Grey” was always destined to be a blockbuster the quality of the film was beside the point.Īfter all, the erotic romance novel, based on saucy “Twilight” fan-fiction, did great business, despite being a 500-page lesson in how not to use a thesaurus. Strike it out.The movie adaptation of E.L. And Taylor-Johnson and Marcel somehow give Ana the one thing that makes her truly endearing: a sense of humor! That’s how she pulls of this doozy of a line: “Find anal fisting. In his review, David Edelstein writes of the actress: “Johnson doesn’t so much speak her lines as float them, removing the sharp notes so that Anastasia can seem both intelligent and strangely unassertive - the sort of smart, unformed woman who’d be irresistible to a man with a compulsion to dominate.” While Book Ana repeatedly says she’s smart, it’s doesn’t ever feel that way. She’s able to turn embarrassing lines into funny ones she can go from silly to coy to sexy on a dime. She breathes new life into Anastasia Steele that perhaps even E.L. One of the more pleasantly surprising things about Fifty Shades of Grey’s film adaptation is Dakota Johnson. Luckily, human sounds don’t take the form of these outbursts, and Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades doesn’t have poor Dakota Johnson sounding like a 1950s cartoon character. Sometimes it’s, “Oh jeez!” Or: “Holy crap!” (And, strangely, “Double crap!”) It’s difficult to read. That’s a lot of sex to write! And James’s Fifty Shades has Ana Steele so unaccustomed to the whole thing that all she can do is exclaim. Sex scenes in books are often hard to read, so imagine, if you will, a book that has a sex scene almost every five pages. There’s no “Oh jeez!” “Holy crap!” “Argh!” It’s weird! In the movie, there’s very little of this. There are times she literally has to clean her plate before he’ll have sex with her. James, she’s soooooooo skinny), it really turns him into a stern father figure. In the book, this hankering is not only tiresome (We get it, E.L. RIP, you absurd personification.Ĭhristian isn’t as obsessed with Ana’s caloric intake.Ĭhristian’s early years of starvation and neglect make it so that he is constantly harassing poor Ana about not eating enough. Thankfully, the film does not need Ana’s inner monologue, so that inner goddess is killed. Ana’s inner goddess dances (“My very small inner goddess sways in a gentle victorious samba”) she does gymnastics (“My inner goddess is doing backflips in a routine worthy of a Russian Olympic gymnast”) she even gets a hotel room (“My inner goddess has a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outside of her room”). Grey’s advances excitedly (while she can only blush). Perhaps one of the book’s most ridiculous strategies is giving poor Anastasia Steele an “inner goddess” who reacts to Mr. (Does anyone else equate reading emails with doing work? Exactly.) Luckily, Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Kelly Marcel turn the emailing into a bit of a montage, cut with a goofy Danny Elfman score and cheesy innuendo played up for laughs. But reading emails in a book is extremely boring, and reading emails onscreen, even more so. They’re flirty and suggestive and are likely meant to show the two loosening up a bit - Ana to the idea of getting smacked around (with given consent!), and Christian just in general because he is cripplingly uptight. They go back and forth for what feels like forever, intended to show Anastasia and Christian hashing out the details of the dreaded contract. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey is full of emails. Movies often aren’t deemed “better” than the beloved books they adapt, but with director Sam Taylor-Johnson at the helm and really nowhere to go but up, we assumed that the film would improve quite a bit on the pages. Now we’re left with this question: Could the movie possibly be better than the book? Well, yeah. Sexiness alone, however (along with some pervasive nationwide BDSM curiosity), was enough to place it in a top-selling slot for what seemed like forever - and more important, perhaps, get author E.L. The overall consensus on Fifty Shades of Grey when it first appeared on bookshelves was that it wasn’t a great book.
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