‘Fifty Shades’ of green, not ‘Grey’

As you can see from the all the Interwebs chatter out there, trouble seems to be brewing at the "Fifty Shades of Grey" worksite. Amazing the furor a $265 million world-wide box-office take can cause. I know that if I had made that much on a reported $40 million production budget, I'd be upset.

Tongue. Held firmly. In cheek.

Thing is, no one other wants to be laughed at, especially not pretentious panderers of the arts. Laughed with, yes. Laughed at? Even Jon Stewart has a famous breaking point. No, these people — Universal Pictures, director Sam Taylor-Johnson and especially writer Erika Leonard (aka E.L. James) — want to be taken seriously.

Yet how can we? I have not read the books, so I cannot judge. I will, however, let other critics have their say:

Jesse Kornbluth, The Huffington Post: "As a reading experience, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' is a sad joke, puny of plot, padded with conversations that are repeated five or six times and email exchanges that are neither romantic nor witty."

Jessica Reeves, Chicago Tribune: "Put simply, author E L James — who is now officially invulnerable to criticism because she has more money than God — is not a very good writer. Her dialogue is stilted, the descriptions of place overwrought, and the characters and plot so predictable that a reader could theoretically skip over several dozen pages of text and still be utterly unsurprised by new developments."

I could go on. But you get the point. Besides, I did see the movie. And that is bad enough.

The advantage that books — even bad books — have over movies is that they leave so much to the imagination. Even a writer as presumably clumsy as Leonard/James can present scenes that readers (particularly the impressionable ones) can embellish with their own blends of memory and fantasy. The problem for any filmmaker is how to best try to recapture a book's, mmmm, scenario — including theme and tone — visually.

And that becomes especially troublesome when the subject involves sex. Think of what Adrian Lyne gave us with "9 1/2 Weeks." What Stanley Kubrick presented in "Eyes Wide Shut." Let's not even go to the BDSM arena that "Killing Me Softly" and "Secretary" took us.

Point is, such cinematic explorations are difficult to pull off. Even for talented filmmakers, something that Taylor-Johnson isn't particularly. And so what we end up with is a bunch of nudity, all of which plays coyly with genital areas (male and female), some heavy breathing and a few slaps with a "flogger."

Along with an ending that is as blatant an announcement of a sequel as has ever been filmed. Which is where this blog post began. If the two "Fifty Shades of …" sequels do get made, they might follow in the path of another recent popular book-to-film series: "The Hunger Games." The producers may change directors in mid-creation.

Which might not be a bad thing. It certainly can't hurt.