Okay... On a date night it was between Cinderella (new live action version) and Fifty Shades of Grey. I let the wife choose.
I was thinking Cinderella.
She chose Fifty Shades.
Lemme say right now that I've seen worse movies. The sex is so tame that I didn't feel so much as a stir down below. This is no 9 1/2 weeks.
I won't bother with a full breakdown, but the film that was supposed to be so brave showed neither actor or actress in full frontal nudity. We're supposed to suspend our belief regarding this budding BDSM "romance", but no one shows their junk in the privacy of their own homes?
The writing was gawd awful, the editing was tasteful... Which, for a movie like this should be an insult. It shouldn't be grind house or cinema verite, but it almost looks like they were shooting for a PG-13 rating. Hell, based on what I saw, I don't see any reason it couldn't be. The directing was a damned mess, but nothing could save anyone from the total crap writing and even worse characters...
No stars, no points.... it wasn't intelligent, sexy or even the slightest bit enlightening about the BDSM world unless it's common for new BDSM "couples" to have really long meetings in boardrooms checking off boxes of what they won't do as if that's the hottest thing ever.
The ONE good thing... Dakota Johnson (Don Johnson's daughter is the lead female in Fifty Shades) is 100x better as the fan fiction vision for Bella than Kristen She-Who-Has-One-Expression-For-All-Things... Which really was refreshing because if she were a carbon copy... The film would have strayed into the "Showgirls" zone... That zone of films that I refer to which makes me viscerally angry upon viewing.
Here's a phrase I'm not sure I would have said prior to realizing what our movie choices were: I really wish we'd seen Cinderella.