Delayed Reaction: Fifty Shades Darker

The Pitch: It'll be like Fifty Shades of Grey, only darker.

Anastasia takes Christian back and he has to face some of the demons from his past.

There's not much to say about this movie. It felt like it was made out of requirement, not like anyone was fully engaged on the project. I like Dakota Johnson, only not in this role (I have a lot of affection for Ben & Kate. RIP). Jamie Dornan is still pretty generic (at least in this role). Bella Heathecote and Marcia Gay Harden are there too. It's hard to believe that Kim Basinger is an Oscar winner watching her in this. The movie isn't very good.

Instead, I'd like to have a very juvenile discussion about nudity. The balance is all off in this movie (both of the movies, really). It has too much without being enough. The film has the safest amount of gratuitous nudity an R-rating will allow. There's no penis and no vagina. There's a lot of boobs and butts. It's definitely more on the side of the male-gaze, but neither Anastasia or Christian are more than objects in those naked  moments. I'm not sure I buy into the idea of "artistic nudity" in most movies. 90% of the nudity I'll see in movies feels like someone (a director, a writer, a producer) just wanted a naked person in the movie. Those scenes could get by just as well without nudity. My response in those moments is "That was nice. I'm not sure it was needed, but I'm all for it". The Fifty Shades movies do it wrong though. There should never be enough nudity in a movie that I'm stopping to judge the performances while the nudity is happening. Call it the Anne Hathaway Rule. In Brokeback Mountain, it was brief enough that I didn't have time to think if the topless scene was even needed. In Love & Other Drugs, she's naked so often so constant that I have enough time to wonder what the point of it all is. That's how it gets in the Fifty Shades movies. It starts to feel like the bedroom scenes are there just because they spice up an otherwise dull movie and with diminishing returns. I guess what I'm trying to say is that a movie should never be so bad that I want to fast forward through the naked parts.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend