Lots of people saw Fifty Shades of Grey this weekend. I wasn't one of them. (I never saw Two Girls, One Cup either.) But Amanda Hess did see Fifty Shades. It isn't a good movie, says Amanda, but she loved it:
Fifty Shades of Grey is not a âgoodâ movie, but itâs a mistake to judge it like any other: Buying into the Fifty Shades experience is more like purchasing a ticket to a funhouse tour through Fifty Shadesâ weird, wild fandom. The Anastasia Steele of the book is an aww-shucks virgin in constant dialogue with her âinner goddess,â but the Anastasia of the movie is a stand-in for the Fifty Shades skepticâthe literal plot finds her seduced into the kinky world of Christian, but the obvious subtext is that our heroine has fallen down the rabbit hole of the cultural phenomenon of Fifty Shades itself. Director Taylor-Johnson says she deliberately recast the story in the image of a âa deep, dark, romantic adult fairy tale,â and the film is riddled with references to Alice in Wonderland (Anastasia wakes up with a hangover to find that Christian has left her painkillers marked âeat meâ and juice marked âdrink meâ), and Beauty and the Beast (this time, the mysterious beast with the opulent mansion is already ridiculously good-looking, and the heroine is tasked with transforming him from a tortured control freak and into a regular boyfriend). The audience already knows Christianâs âterribleâ secret, and the film exploits our ironic awareness that the sweet, innocent Ana is pratfalling straight into his dungeon.
Kelsey McKinney at Vox notes that Fifty Shades passes the Bechdel Test. Actually, the film aces the Bechdel test:
Fifty Shades of Grey is a movie about Ana, her life, and her relationship with a very rich man who likes to have kinky sex. As the movie focuses mostly on her relationship with Mr. Christian Grey, it would have been easy for the director and screenwriter (both women) to accidentally allow the movie to fail the test.
To be fair, Ana does talk about Christian a lot. She talks about him to her mother, and her best friend. Mostly, she talks about him to him. The majority of conversations in the movie are between Ana and Christian. But what makes Ana a believable character, and a fun one to watch, is that her personality isn't defined by her relationship with Christian. This movie easily passes the Bechdel Test.
Ana has conversations with other women about school, work, grades, lunch, and dinner. "These are small moments, and none of them take more than two minutes of screen time," McKinney notes, but with nearly half of all films failing the Bechdel Testâmeaning, nearly half of all films made don't have "more than two named female characters" that we see having a conversation that isn't about a male characterâit's remarkable that this particular movie passed it.
But hands down my favorite comment about the movieâat least so farâwas this batshit "Open Letter to Young People About Fifty Shades of Grey" by Miriam Grossman:
A psychologically healthy woman avoids pain. She wants to feel safe, respected and cared for by a man she can trust. She dreams about wedding gowns, not handcuffs.
Because it's impossible for a girlâor a boyâto dream about both wedding gowns and handcuffs.
Any Sloggers seen the flick? What did you think?