Whenever the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books came out, some women got me to read them. Actually, I listened to the books-on-cd while I drove across the country. I never made it to the third book, but I thought the first book was “Okay,” and the most of the second book was the same. But the second book didn’t give me any compelling reason to read the third book, so I stopped there.
When I first heard about the movie coming out I was looking forward to it, not for the sex scenes, but as I told a friend, I was looking forward to everything up to the “contract” and “red room of pain” scenes. (Admittedly, I was also curious to see who they would cast for the parts.)
Last night I watched the first hour of the movie, and to my amazement they butchered everything I wanted to see. It’s like the director felt they had to rush through the beginning of the movie to get to the sex scenes, where IMHO, the beginning of the movie sets the ground for the relationship between Christian and Ana. Sadly, they rushed everything, so as a viewer you could care less what these people did for the rest of the movie.
As just one example of how bad the movie is, after the photo shoot at the hotel and the elevator scene, in the book Christian grabs Ana’s hand and holds it all the way to the coffee shop. This helps to show that while he’s a successful business man, mentally he’s just a teenager when it comes to relationships. In the movie they skipped that part entirely.
Really, they screwed up so many things in the first hour of the movie I could go on for a long time. I haven’t watched the rest of the movie, but I watched some of the “Bonus” material on the DVD, and when they director and other people were talking about how they interpreted the movie and had their “vision” for how it should be, I was yelling at the tv, “You screwed it up, that’s what you did!”
I don’t know what the rest of the movie is like yet, but at the moment I’m thinking that if they did such a poor job on the simple, clean (generally non-sexual) material, the rest of it can’t be very good either.