“Fifty Shades” may have begun as “Twilight” fan fiction, but Ms.

Their first meeting takes place in his office, where Anastasia, with her messy bangs and shapeless blue cardigan, looks absurdly out of place amid the sleek corporate Valkyries. She’s an ordinary, guileless, somewhat clueless young woman - kind of basic, as they say nowadays - pulled into the orbit of an enigmatic aristocrat with peculiar tastes and dark secrets. But the energy that brings her and Christian together is comic as well as sexual. James’s books have called attention to Ana’s habit of exclaiming “Wow!” and “Holy crap!” when a more heightened vocabulary (or no words at all) might seem to be called for. He has his own helicopter, which he pilots himself an underground garage full of cars with a chauffeur to drive them a penthouse apartment with a grand piano and a walk-in closet so big that his suits hang without even touching.Īnastasia’s portion of the dialogue is more likely to be funny on purpose. In the tradition of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jay Gatsby, James Franco’s Alien (from “Spring Breakers”) and Kanye West’s Kanye West, this young mogul (played by Jamie Dornan) treats luxury consumption as an erotic passion and a spiritual calling. Sex is a knotty business, perhaps all the more so when actual knots are involved, as they tend to be in the world of Christian Grey, the kinky billionaire bachelor who lends his name and his impressive collection of neckties to this Seattle-set tale of seduction, submission and commodity fetishism.Ĭhristian has a lot of psychic baggage, but for most of this installment in the “Fifty Shades” trilogy, it’s obscured by his physical stuff. James’s best seller is, like the book itself, a wildly confused treatment of a perennial confusing subject. The last answer seems the most likely, since Sam Taylor-Johnson’s screen adaptation of E. Was it delight? Derision? Embarrassment? Surprise? All of the above? The source of that laughter continues to puzzle and intrigue me, perhaps more than the actual movie did. At the end of a recent New York sneak preview of “ Fifty Shades of Grey” - in the blackout between the final lines of dialogue (“Anastasia!” “Christian!”) and the first breathy notes of the last Beyoncé song - a lot of the audience burst out laughing.

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