I don't know whether to worship at your feet, or spank you.

Fifty Shades Darker

(2017)

(SPOILERS) I suspect you could throw any director at this material and still end up with results akin to watching erotic paint dry. As such, Fifty Shades Darker’s woes cannot fairly be laid at the door of James Foley (responsible for Glengarry Glen Ross, but also Who’s That Girl). You spend most of the running time hoping for a murder to brighten things up, or for Paul Verhoeven take over the reins and inject some crazy Dutch angles.

Fifty Shades may have started out as Twilight fanfic, but they stand as equals in offering audiences inert cinematic versions. For every repetitive dialogue exchange in Darker, there’s a cumulatively amorphous soundtrack interlude accompanying a montage of sexy business between the S&M-lite lovers. Or, in the absence of sexy business, just a cumulatively amorphous soundtrack interlude accompanying a montage of whatever it may be (shopping, having dinner, take your pick). The only relief comes from the inadvertent silliness of the plotting and… actually, no, that’s about it.

Dakota Johnson was the highlight (I know, it’s relative) of the first movie, but here, her sub-Melanie Griffith – appropriate, given that’s Mumsie – submissively-reactive squeak quickly becomes tiresome. As for Jamie Dornan, who seems to spend about 70% of the movie undoing his trousers, he flourishes all the personality of a dried haddock, but at least the more amusing moments revolve around him.

To encourage us into feeling some empathy for this extremely messed-up multimillionaire, rather than leaping to the conclusion that Christian’s a deranged sociopath leading poor Anastasia down a path of ruin, we’re invited to engage with some of his backstory, explaining his quirky fixations and fetishes. None of which really gives the greenlight to his penchant for depravity (I know, consenting adults, or one consenting adult and another pressurised into acts she wouldn’t otherwise entertain), but we do learn mom was a crack whore (I don’t think that’s exactly the term used, but you get the idea) and that Kimmy Basinger tutored him in the ways of unrighteousness (cashing in on her dubious cachet from another tedious softcore romp, back in the mists of time when Mickey Rourke could be sold on the basis of his face). There’s also an “exciting” helicopter crash sequence where Christian goes all Harrison Ford at the controls – albeit, he doesn’t look stoned – leading to an earnest “He has to be okay” vigil.

Perhaps if Anastasia was “just a mousy little thing after his money”, or Christian looked like Harvey Weinstein, there’d be more to be invested in here, but the proceedings are so inoffensively titillation-free, it’s easy to zone out completely. There’s a sub-Eyes Wide Shut mask ball (as in, no hookers or illuminati present), Christian’s sex dungeon (more of a boudoir; “Those are nipple clamps”) and a fingering in a lift scene that’s only worth remarking upon for mining zero of its comic potential.

Anastasia has a truly nasty boss called, wait for it, Mr Hyde (Eric Johnson), involved in a subplot that inches uneasily towards drama, designed as it is to throw Christian’s smoothly manipulative, controlling demeanour into sharp relief, but is ultimately so ham-fisted that it comes across as merely inane. Another features Bella Heathcote as one of Christian’s former submissives, which actually threatens to become interesting in one scene, but then Ana is asked to leave and we’re obliged to too.

These Fifty Shades only rarely reach the level of actively bad, but that’s rather to their detriment, as at least so-bad-it’s-good passes the time. They’re movies seemingly designed for that tea break where you know you won’t miss anything important, even if you’re out of the room for the majority of the running time.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

You killed my sandwich!

Birds of Prey (and the Fanatabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)
(SPOILERS) One has to wonder at Bird of Prey’s 79% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I mean, such things are to be taken with a pinch of salt at the best of times, but it would be easy, given the disparity between such evident approval and the actually quality of the movie, to suspect insincere motives on the part of critics, that they’re actually responding to its nominally progressive credentials – female protagonists in a superhero flick! – rather than its content. Which I’m quite sure couldn’t possibly be the case. Birds of Prey (and the Fanatabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) isn’t very good. The trailers did not lie, even if the positive reviews might have misled you into thinking they were misleading.

Afraid, me? A man who’s licked his weight in wild caterpillars? You bet I’m afraid.

Monkey Business (1931)
(SPOILERS) The Marx Brothers’ first feature possessed of a wholly original screenplay, Monkey Business is almost brazenly dismissive towards notions of coherence, just as long as it loosely supports their trademark antics. And it does so in spades, depositing them as stowaways bound for America who fall in with a couple of mutually antagonistic racketeers/ gangsters while attempting to avoid being cast in irons. There’s no Margaret Dumont this time out, but Groucho is more than matched by flirtation-interest Thelma Todd.

Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honour – which is probably more than she ever did.

Duck Soup (1933)
(SPOILERS) Not for nothing is Duck Soup acclaimed as one of the greatest comedies ever, and while you’d never hold it against Marx Brothers movies for having little in the way of coherent plotting in – indeed, it’s pretty much essential to their approach – the presence of actual thematic content this time helps sharpen the edges of both their slapstick and their satire.

You’re a disgrace to the family name of Wagstaff, if such a thing is possible.

Horse Feathers (1932)
(SPOILERS) After a scenario that seemed feasible in Monkey Business – the brothers as stowaways – Horse Feathers opts for a massive stretch. Somehow, Groucho (Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff) has been appointed as the president of Huxley University, proceeding to offer the trustees and assembled throng a few suggestions on how he’ll run things (by way of anarchistic creed “Whatever it is, I’m against it”). There’s a reasonably coherent mission statement in this one, however, at least until inevitably it devolves into gleeful incoherence.

Bad luck to kill a seabird.

The Lighthouse (2019)
(SPOILERS) Robert Eggers’ acclaimed – and Oscar-nominated – second feature is, in some respects, a similar beast to his previous The Witch, whereby isolated individuals of bygone eras are subjected to the unsparing attentions of nature. In his scheme of things, nature becomes an active, embodied force, one that has no respect for the line between imaginings and reality and which proceeds to test its targets’ sanity by means of both elements and elementals. All helped along by unhealthy doses of superstition. But where The Witch sustained itself, and the gradual unravelling of the family unit led to a germane climax, The Lighthouse becomes, well, rather silly.

To defeat the darkness out there, you must defeat the darkness inside yourself.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)
Easily the best of the Narnia films, which is maybe damning it with faint praise.

Michael Apted does a competent job directing (certainly compared to his Bond film - maybe he talked to his second unit this time), Dante Spinotti's cinematography is stunning and the CGI mostly well-integrated with the action.

Performance-wise, Will Poulter is a stand-out as a tremendously obnoxious little toff, so charismatic you're almost rooting for him. Simon Pegg replaces Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep and delivers a touching performance.
***

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog