Winter is not yet behind us and, appropriately, discontent has already visited, in the shape of the 1st box office blockbuster/cause célèbre of 2015: 50 Shades of Grey.
50 Shades of Grey is the 2nd feature film by Sam Taylor-Johnson, reportedly a renowned British visual artist, whose first and so far only other foray into film was Nowhere Boy (2009), a more or less passable account of the troubled youth of John Lennon in pre-Bealtes days.
Apparently based on an even worse best seller book, 50 Shades of Grey tells the story of the sentimental education of college student and aspiring young journalist Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and self made millionaire/über control freakazoid Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), implausibly falling in love after a brief and even more implausible interview, she subsequently slowly and painfully trying to convert him to a semblance of a normal relationship, he awkwardly and unevenly seeking to introduce her to the joys of softcore SM, complete with Victoria's Secret style pleasure dome, featuring red velvet sofas, leather whips, shiny, shiny, shiny silver handcuffs and every other cliché you'd expect would be avoided when staging such stuff. It's sort of like Die Bittere Tränen der Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972) meets 9 and ½ weeks(Adrian Lyne, 1986) meets Pretty Woman (Garry Marshal, 1990) meets Bitter Moon (Roman Polanski, 1992), if the 1st and last had been scripted, dialogued and directed as stupidly as possible without doing so deliberately.
Two good things can be said about 50 Shades of Grey: the acting is overall honourable (quite an achievement considering the material) and it can be considered to be of sociological interest, as a gauge of what Hollywood thinks contemporary mainstream audiences are prepared to accept as a portrayal of sadism (revealingly, all the kinky hanky panky manages to feature no frontal nudity…). Lots of bad things could be said about it, but there's no point.
Except maybe for this: I suspect the producers and promoters of the film would not disagree with most of the above, and they did it so on purpose because they thought that was the best to way to sell it to its purported target audience: young adults. If I was one of them, I'd feel insulted.