Taylor Swift – Memphis Flyer

Aloha, dear readers! Happy late V-Day and thanks for reading this review of Fifty Shades Darker, a cinematic experience that is either one of the defining films of our generation or a particularly long bottled water commercial. Or maybe it’s the visual album for 2017’s most innocuous club anthems? Or an FCC-commissioned instructional exercise in the limits of R ratings? An awards-show compilation cataloging the most expensive pure-plot scenes ever to make it into porn?

Whatever Fifty Shades Darker actually is (and let us not look too deeply, my friends, into that fickle mirror of the self), it is definitely the second of its kind. There was a first, called Fifty Shades of Grey, and there will be a third, called Fifty Shades Freed. Before the Fifty Shades trilogy was on-screen, it was in-book, and before it was in-book, it was online. The story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, two dreadfully entwined lovers from the black heart of Seattle, originated as Twilight fanfiction. It was penned by an author named E.L. James, who is now very, very rich. Steele’s and Grey’s is a story about BDSM and helicopters and what it’s like to be a working girl with a billionaire boyfriend.

This is a nice thing that happens to Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Darker.

At the beginning of this franchise middle child, we meet Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) on the first day of her new job at an independent publishing company. She is no longer dating businessman Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) because at the end of the last movie, Christian revealed to Ana his penchant for x-treme sadism, and she was like no way, my man, not happening to this English major. But now Grey wants Ana back. He sends her white roses to congratulate her on her job and shows up uninvited at her friend’s photography show. She tries to resist his attentions, but because her character is never allowed to speak above the decibel level of a mournful library-whisperer, she fails. So they go out to dinner, and then (kind of a spoiler?) they are fucking again. Only this time it isn’t gonna be about submission. It is going to be a real relationship, on her terms.

Uhhhhggg. Reader, come here. Closer. Closer. Good. Mama is tired. Tired. I want to summarize the rest of this plot for you, but I just can’t. These are the few moments in the film that one might mistake for plot points:

• Christian Grey’s stalkery former submissive shows up threateningly;

• Ana’s boss at her new job looms weird and threateningly;

• Helicopter malfunction;

• Someone fires a gun (at this point in the movie, a dude behind me in the theater said, “I didn’t pay to see this type of shit.”);

• Christian Grey’s stalkery older woman who ruined his youth shows up threateningly.

But, as with the first Fifty Shades, these narrative points really only serve to punctuate the actual purpose of the whole undertaking, and that purpose is “nice stuff parade.” There is so much nice stuff in this movie! There’s a super nice masquerade ball to which Anastasia Steele wears a really sexy gray dress and mask. The masquerade ball is thrown in honor of a charity called Coping Together (definitely 2017’s leading V-Day sentiment), and “Coping Together” is printed on a drum kit. That’s nice! And what else? There’s a sailboat, a home gym that includes a pommel horse, lots of flowers, bottled water, and black SUVs. There are lots of scary-but-hot people! Rita Ora is here, presumably playing a character in the movie, and she has blonde hair. There’s also new Taylor Swift and ZAYN collaboration that I want to hate but is actually stuck in my head. Nice!

The best part of the whole thing comes in one of the numerous, tedious partial-sex scenes, when Christian Grey is beginning to make sweet love to the dulcet, overproduced tones of some song, and it’s doing that subtle techno thing. And then the music stops. And then right when the beat drops, he thrusts.

Please, y’all. Don’t go see Fifty Shades Darker. Instead stay home with your partner/a stranger from the internet and try to perfect thrusting to the drop of a club anthem.

About halfway through The Giver, I was reminded of a scene from Tim Burton’s Ed Wood in which Johnny Depp, playing the titular “worst director ever,” has a filmmaking revelation: “I could make an entire movie out of stock footage!” In the case of this adaptation of Lois Lowery’s 1993 young-adult novel, it’s more like: “I could make an entire movie out of color grading!” Although to be fair, there are long passages of the 94-minute movie that feel like stock footage.

The Giver tells the story of Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), a young man coming of age in a utopian community built from the ashes of an apocalypse called “The Ruin.” The creepily ordered community (known as “The Community”) is built on top of a mesa perpetually surrounded by clouds, and its people have no knowledge of the outside world. Indeed, they don’t have very much knowledge of anything beyond their professions, which are chosen for them in a public ceremony (known as “The Ceremony”) where the old, who have no memory of Logan’s Run, are also given “release.” His friends Fiona (Odeya Rush) and Asher (Cameron Monaghan) are given jobs as Nurturer and Drone Pilot, but Jonas is chosen to be the Receiver of Memories. He is apprenticed to The Giver (Jeff Bridges), the psychic repository of all of the memories of the time before The Ruin.

Here’s where the color grading comes in. The first act of the movie is in black and white, because members of The Community cannot perceive color, or indeed anything the The Elders (led by Meryl Streep) deem a threat to order and happiness. But as Jonas is given more and more knowledge of the Before Time by The Giver, his world, and thus the movie, slowly gains color. The colorization accelerates when Jonas decides not to take his daily injections of mind control drugs. As he learns the truth about the perfect world the Elders have built, he comes to understand why the last Receiver of Memories, Rosemary (Taylor Swift), only lasted two months before meeting some unknown but probably really bad fate. When he finds out that “release” is, of course, death, and that a baby named Gabriel who has been assigned to his family is scheduled for release, Jonas sets out to save The Community from itself by escaping to Elsewhere and thus, through some mechanism that makes about as much sense as the rest of the plot, restoring the memories to the people. I’ll let you guess what happens from there, because what you come up with is probably going to be more interesting than The Giver‘s snoozer of a finale.

Director Phillip Noyce is clearly under orders to create the next big teen sensation adapted from a young adult novel, but the material he is working with lacks the depth of Harry Potter and none of his lead actors has the charisma of The Hunger Games‘ Jennifer Lawrence. Supposed hero Thwaites actually has scenes stolen from him by a hologram of Taylor Swift. Bridges, who has reportedly been trying to get this movie made for years, inexplicably speaks in a painful sounding croak, and Streep is, well, Meryl Streep in a Saruman wig.

I have not read the Newberry award-winning book upon which it is based, but it seems that Alfred Hitchcock’s dictum that mediocre books make the best movies holds true. Lowery’s book is meant to be allegorical and universal, but when Jonah actually finds a map marked “Plan For Sameness” that tells him how to defeat said plan, it’s a real Mystery Science Theater moment. It’s also hard to overlook the reactionary overtones as the genetically superior “chosen one” rebels against forced equality, the baby killing bad guys say “precision of speech” in place of “political correctness,” and the promised land looks like a Thomas Kinkade painting where it is inexplicably Christmas all the time. The politics wouldn’t be a problem if it was entertaining — after all, one of my favorite films of the century is The Incredibles, which has an Ayn Rand streak that renders the villain’s motivations incoherent. But The Incredibles delivers the adventure goods, while The Giver can’t execute a simple Hero’s Journey plot for all of the speechifying. Even the central color grading gimmick was more successfully done by Pleasantville 16 years ago. For a film that claims to champion colorful nonconformity, The Giver is depressingly drab.