Oh, Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. When are those two crazy kids ever going to get together? There’s is a love story we can all relate to: she, the inexperienced college student and would-be journalist, and he, the millionaire Seattle playboy, willing to teach her in the practice of love. Would their shared appreciation for BDSM be enough to overcome their differences and help them find true love? I don’t know for sure, but based on this first teaser trailer for Fifty Shades Freed, I’m going to venture that the answer to that question is yes.
Apparently the press tour for Fifty Shades of Grey in 2015 was just much too sexy, because Universal has slapped a gag order right onto the faces of the Fifty Shades Darker stars, forbidding them from making any sorts of innuendoes while promoting a movie about sex, lies, and BDSM.
For most people, the decision to make a sequel to 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey is probably the punchline to a bad joke. But have you actually stopped and looked at the box office numbers for Fifty Shades of Grey recently? We’re not talking about $100 million at the global box office; we’re not even talking about $200 million. We’re talking about $571 million worldwide, more than Mad Max: Fury Road and Creed combined and the eleventh highest-grossing movie of the year. With those kind of numbers, you pretty much have to make a sequel. I don’t blame them.
It’s every woman’s fantasy: not the perfect man, but the man who is perfect in all ways except one, which can only be changed with the gentle touch of a lover. Anastasia Steele, the Dakota Johnson-played protagonist of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, shares this widespread fixer-upper fetish, and she makes as much clear in the new trailer for Fifty Shades Darker. In the film disappointingly not titled Fifty-One Shades of Grey, Ana accepts Christian back into her life under the condition that he cut it out with all the brooding angst that originally attracted her to him and got old pretty quickly. They let one another back into their lives (and beds, and red-lit sexual torture chambers), but tragedy may cut the honeymoon phase short.
In Fifty Shades of Grey, Jamie Dornan’s Christian Grey alludes to his former lover / sex buddy Elena Lincoln, who basically serves as his very own Mrs. Robinson — the two had an affair when Christian was just 15 years old, as if his whole situation couldn’t get any more skeevy. Today comes news that Universal has found its Ms. Lincoln in Kim Basinger, a fitting choice for the role of the seductive, experienced and confident character who will throw a wrench in Christian’s relationship with Ana.
Christian Grey is an unusual guy. He’s the world’s most eligible billionaire bachelor and an enormously powerful businessman. He’s an avid jogger, an exceptional piano player, and a licensed helicopter pilot. He also really like the color gray. He wears gray suits and ties, drives a gray car to his gray office building (which is called Grey House) under gray Seattle skies, where his assistant dresses in—you guessed it—gray. (For the record, his office chairs are white but the couches are gray too.) And, oh yeah, he’s into kinky sex, including bondage, spanking, and domination.
That 'Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2' trailer almost stole some thunder tonight because I pretty much forgot that we were getting a brand, uh, spanking new, Beyoncé-accompanied trailer for '50 Shades of Grey.' Shady move, Blart. The second full trailer for the upcoming adaptation of the popular 'Twilight' fan-fiction erotica novel is here, so let's break it down, shall we?
We won’t know exactly how graphic ‘50 Shades of Grey’ is going to be until we see the film with our own cursed eyeballs, but we now officially know that the film has been given an R-rating by the pearl-clutching members of the MPAA. What does that R-rating stand for? Graphic nudity, “strong sexual content,” and “unusual behavior.” Wait, what the hell is unusual behavior?!
One of the great celebratory moments of 2014 was seeing Ben Affleck nude in 'Gone Girl' (and a little bit of Neil Patrick Harris too, if you were paying attention). It's not as if us women are male-nudity-starved, craven maniacs just salivating for a glimpse of wang or something, but with all the rampant female nudity and objectification that permeates pop culture, it's nice to see a little equality. So it's disheartening to hear that Jamie Dornan will not be appearing fully nude in '50 Shades of Grey,' as if that movie needed another reason to be avoided.