Because Everybody Else Has One

Well, at least they didn't split this final book into two movies! This review is also up on Channel 24 What it's about Anastasia and Christian are now married but their new life as blissful newly weds is complicated when Anna's former boss returns to claim his pound of flesh from the couple he believes to be responsible for destroying his life. What we thought The Fifty Shades of Grey series of novels started life as erotic, slightly kinky Twilight fan-fiction and despite becoming a huge literary sensation in its own right once it changed a few names and dumped the whole sparkly vampires thing (even E.L. James has limits, apparently), no one in their right mind would claim it to be anything other a light bit of smutty romance whose only real achievement was making the reading of such a thing socially acceptable; at least for a little while. Adapting it to the screen, however, was always going to be something of an uphill battle as there was no way...

Making Fifty Shades of Grey look like a perfect masterpiece... This review is also up at Channel 24 . However, since I wrote it rather late at night, soon after seeing the film, there are quite a few grammatical errors on my Channel 24 version, which hopefully I caught for this slight revised review. But no, my opinion on the movie has hardly softened over the past few days so the general gist is much the same... What it's about Following on from the events of Fifty Shades of Grey, Anastasia and Christian try to give their relationship another chance, even as obstacles – both inside and out – threaten to tear them apart. What we thought In my review for the film, I went through some lengths to defend Fifty Shades of Grey as a film that never really had a chance to transcend its dodgy source material, but one that gave it the old college try anyway. Director, Sam Taylor-Wood gave the film a sense of style that elevated the clumsy trashiness of its source mate...

The movie that everyone's talking about. 'Nuff said. This review (along with a million-and-one comments) is also up at Channel 24 . What it's about Based on the mega-selling “literary” sensation by E.L. James, Anastasia Steele is a shy university student who becomes sexually and romantically involved with the coldly controlling Christian Grey, an elusive billionaire bachelor whose many dark and kinky secrets threaten to torpedo their blossoming relationship before it even begins. What we thought Cards on the table time: I have not read the vast, vast majority of the Fifty Shades trilogy, nor do I plan on doing so, but I have read a chapter or two out of morbid curiosity and have heard enough about this huge phenomenon (not least of all through hilarious celebrity readings of the sex scenes by the likes of Gilbert Godfrey and George Takei) that I really shouldn't have been surprised by just how uncomfortably wrong-headed its story turned out to be w...