Video review: "Fifty Shades Darker"

Occasionally people ask me why I don’t write more terrible reviews of movies.

(I’m assuming they’re being kind and asking why I don’t call more movies terrible, rather than describing the quality of the reviews I pen.)

The truth is that I genuinely feel Hollywood doesn’t make too many truly awful films. And I like to think of myself as a generous critic with wide-ranging tastes. I can usually find at least one or two things to like about even flicks I hate.

Everything is pretested and post-tested to death with audiences these days, so if the studios know they have a real honker on their hands, they’ll shelve it or push it straight to video. For tiny budget stinkers, they’ll simply refuse to show it to critics. So those tend to come and go pretty quickly at theaters without anyone seeing them, or me writing about them.

“Fifty Shades Darker” falls into the rare category of a high-profile movie that’s truly rotten. It’s a sequel to a big hit about a young woman who falls in for a man who’s into BDSM – cuffs, whips and such – and was based on a very popular trashy trio of novels read almost exclusively by women.

What it says about modern feminism that so many females are attracted to stories about dominant men who like to bruise the flesh of his lovers, I know not.

I actually didn’t think the first movie was half bad, but the follow-up is utterly groan-worthy. It’s not even the sort of bad that you can laugh at and mock; you just want it the pain to cease.

Dakota Johnson returns Anastasia Steele, and Jamie Dornan is back as Christian Grey, in a pair of characters battling for the title of Most Fake-Sounding Fictional Name. He’s a billionaire who likes to beat on ladies, and she’s a wallflower slowly discovering her taste for the kinky stuff.

The plot – screenplay by Niall Leonard, based on the book by E.L. James – concocts several nonsensical twists to fill up time in between the bedroom romps, which are much tamer than you’d think. These include Christian momentarily thought to be lost in a helicopter crash, and an old flame of his (Kim Basinger) showing up to turn the screws on his relationship with Ana.

“Darker,” like its predecessor, made a boatload of money, though a significantly smaller boat. I’d like to think it’s because audiences are wising up. But there’s still one more book in the “Fifty Shades” saga to adapt, so I don’t think the torture is going to stop anytime soon.

Watching this movie is like being a reluctant participant in a frisky whipping, and you’ve forgotten the safe word.

The film is being released on video with an Unrated version that promises to amp up the naughty stuff. Bonus features include deleted scenes and several making-of featurettes: “Writing Darker,” “A Darker Direction,” “Dark Reunion,” “New Threats,” “The Masquerade” and “Intimate with Darker.”

Sounds dark, huh?

Movie:



Extras: 

Review: "Fifty Shades Darker"

 So I read where Dakota Johnson said she used whiskey to get through shooting the sex scenes in “Fifty Shades Darker.” After watching the movie all I can say is: Where’s ours?

And I’m thinking a nice loooong pour, too -- four fingers, at least.

Wow, this is really garbage filmmaking. I scoffed at the first one, "Fifty Shades of Grey," based on the best-selling novel, but had to admit it wasn't terrible. The sequel is truly, desperately rotten.

It's a tiresome exercise in kink that's really not that kinky, a wannabe flesh-fest where there really isn't all that much skin on display. The weirdest things get between billionaire/S&M fan Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) and reluctant submissive/lady love Anastasia Steele (Johnson) is when he shackles her ankles with a rod in between so she can't close her legs.

Oooooo, filthy!

I admit I don't know a lot about BDSM culture -- I've got enough pain in my life without bringing it into the bedroom -- but I get the sense true aficionados would find the couple's activities absurdly tame. Especially after Ana ditched Christian at the end of the first movie because he seemed to be enjoying her suffering.

(Wait, isn't that what the S&M part of BDSM is all about?)

He woos her back about five minutes into the sequel, promising to suppress his naughty ways and love Ana for the person she is. Specifically, a mousy, passive, self-doubting wallflower who pretends not to know how gorgeous she is.

The plot is a tawdry succession of cheap perils cooked up to keep us distracted from a story of two people who make sex a lot more complicated that it needs to be. This includes one of Christian's former "subs" -- women he essentially hired to be his submissive lovers -- going all cray-cray on him. She starts to follow Ana around with increasingly threatening behavior.

And then there's Kim Basinger as Elena, the older "dominant" woman who first turned Christian on to the leather-and-kneeling game when he was a teen. She shows up about once every half hour, her splotchy face seemingly held together by Bondo, to try to undermine Ana's relationship with him.

Then there's the helicopter subplot. It's like the filmmakers turned to each other and said, "Well, we can't just have them having sex the entire movie, but the story comes to a dead stop about 90 minutes in. What can we do to pump things up? ...I know!"

At some point the legions of female fans of these books and movies are going to have to own up to the fact that Christian Grey is, by any objective standard, a major league asshole. He likes to hurt women and is incredibly controlling of Ana, right down to ordering her meal for her at restaurants and telling her what clothes to wear to parties. (Along with... other accoutrements.)

But he's dreamy and a billionaire and has that protruding-veins look that's popular right now, so millions of women are willing to give Christian a pass as a fantasy object.

Let's do a quick experiment: Take all of Christian's personality quirks and bedroom predilections, and transpose that onto the personage of Donald Trump. How's that workin' for ya, ladies?

I've long enjoyed bragging that I never walked out of a movie. I came awfully close this time.

Really, the only thing I liked about the movie is a bit where Johnson repeats a line her mom, Melanie Griffith, said at the end of "Working Girl" when her new secretary offers to fetch her coffee. It's something very few people will get, but it made me think of a much better movie.

I started humming the theme song from that film, "Let the River Run," and it momentarily drowned out the pain of sitting through this one. After all, there was no booze handy.

Review: "How to Be Single"

"How to Be Single" is part raunchy sex comedy, and that part's fun, at least for awhile. But it also wants its moments of tenderness and wisdom, and that stuff is just pure death, man.

In addition, it sets up a female protagonist and her off-the-hook wingwoman, and then just as we're settling in with them and their man troubles, it introduces a whole other heroine, and throws in a sister for the first woman to boot. Suddenly we're dickering around with these two new ladies and their romantic contretemps, plus the main gal, and there are so many storylines and random hook-ups with dudes we lose track of who's on first.

The end result is a confused mash-up of "Love, Actually" and "The Hangover." If that sounds like an impossible mix of mutually exclusive tones, that's because it is.

"Single" is based on the debut novel of Liz Tuccillo, adapted for the screen by Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein and Dana Fox. Christian Ditter directed, and while normally I'm not much of a player in the identity politics game, the use of a male director for a story on dating from a decidedly feminine perspective feels wrongheaded.

The women wind up as feminized versions of male characters, carousing and partying and waking up in bed with people they don't recognize. Except sometimes they show a little regret afterward, whereas the guys wouldn't.

(And considering how much sex these characters have with random strangers, a more credible title would've been, "How to Deal with a Tsunami of STDs.")

Dakota Johnson plays Alice, a sweet girl from Wesleyan University who spent all four years in a relationship with Josh (Nicholas Braun), who's tall and nice and cute but not, y'know, vroom! So she kicks him to the curb when she moves to New York City for a new start. Officially it's a "break," not a break-up, so they can try life as singles to see if they really want to be together.

Alice gets a job in a posh law firm as a paralegal, where she meets Robin, played by the incomparable Rebel Wilson. Wilson always seems to play the same role, yet we never tire of it: the audacious party girl whose orbital confidence wows the boys and divides the girls, who either dismiss her or become her bestie. Alice opts for the latter.

Segue to a bunch of scenes of the pair dancing, drinking, sexing. Alice's first conquest is Tom (Anders Holm), an agreeable bartender whom Robin introduces as the training wheels runway to a new life of debauchery. After their coupling, Tom offers his own pointers on how to avoid emotional entanglements, such as keeping no food or running water in his apartment, so overnight guests have to leave for sustenance.

Then into Tom's bar walks Lucy (Alison Brie), using the free WiFi to maintain her 10 dating site profiles. She thinks she's got this whole mate selection thing down to a science, feeding potential dates into a spreadsheet. Meanwhile, the scruffy pourer across the bar from her might just be her ideal match after all. (When he's not screwing Alice, that is.)

Alice briefly lives with her (implausibly) older sister Meg, an Ob/Gyn doctor played by Leslie Mann who secretly hates babies but even more secretly wants one of her own. She eventually gets pregnant via an anonymous sperm donor but then attracts the eye of a much younger man (Jake Lacy), leading to some predictable prevaricating about the source of her burgeoning belly.

Occasionally the movie remembers to go back to Alice, who's tempted to reunite with Josh, then gets in deep with a slightly older widower (Damon Wayans Jr.) with a young daughter. There's one scene where the guy shows his kid pictures of her mommy for the very first time. It's genuinely moving, but a completely head-whipping changeup from what comes before and after.

I haven't read Tuccillo's book, but to my understanding its protagonist is a publicist pushing 40 who sets off to write a book about what it's like being a single woman in different parts of the world. Which makes "How to Be Single" the latest movie to buy the rights to a book just because somebody liked the title, and throw everything between the covers into the trash.

Review: "Black Mass"

Johnny Depp is expectedly magnificent in "Black Mass," the tale of Irish-American gangster Jimmy "Whitey" Bulger and the unholy alliance he forged with the FBI.

Icy stillness. Searing rage. Dead gaze. A man who exists almost as an energy form: pure malevolence and terror.

It's a terrifically commanding performance. I'm not certain it's a terribly complex one.

Depp holds our every attention every second he's on the screen, as we witness Jimmy's dark, violent saga over a 20-year period. What his character does not do is change one iota over the course of that span.

He arrives in 1975, fully formed and unspeakably evil. We leave him in 1995 without any notable alterations.

His circumstances do shift: initially a small-time hood fighting to control just his hardscrabble Southie neighborhood, Jimmy winds up as Boston's kingpin -- with the unwitting (and witting) help of the local feds. Countless murders are attributed to him or his henchmen, the dank river bridge piles serving as his personal well-stocked graveyard.

He came, he saw, he buried.

The unnerving physical transformation is what first grabs our attention. With stabbing blue eyes, scant, slicked-back hair, corpse-like pallor and a dead tooth, Depp looks like he was dug up out of the ground 10 minutes ago and ensorceled back to rotting half-life.

He seems at once ancient and virile, strutting Mick bravado encased in a body that reflects the soul's irreversible decay. Notably, his appearance does not change as the other actors' faces thicken with increasing layers of age makeup.

Based on the book by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, "Black Mass" aims to be a sprawling gangster saga a la "Goodfellas," showing how absolute corruption seeps everywhere like an oil spill. The plot tends to wander, piling up secondary and tertiary characters, and compounding scenes of Jimmy facing down adversaries that begin to blur into each other.

Director Scott Cooper debuted with the amazing "Crazy Heart," then got caught in a family crime ramble with 2013's "Out of the Furnace." He seems to be a filmmaker who's a master at evoking vivid figures, but is less adroit at assembling a raft of characters and events into a coherent, compelling narrative.

Screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth craft some great individual scenes, but the connective tissue has a Frankenstein feel. I wouldn't so much say that "Black Mass" is too long, but that it allocates its 122 minutes unwisely.

The focus of the story is, or should be, Jimmy's two decades as an informant for the FBI. He found a partner in agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), a fellow Southie who grew up idolizing Jimmy. Connolly offers to protect him if he'll feed information about fellow mobsters. Jimmy's reptilian mind immediately sees an opportunity to use the feds to take out the competition.

Since Jimmy was notoriously vicious toward "rats" in his own organization, this would seem a ripe area for exploration -- how he justified in his own mind the act of informing on other criminals.

But this movie does not get into those sorts of interior monologues. "Black Mass" witnesses Jimmy Bulger only at external angles.

The supporting cast is bulging with talent and, well, just bulging. The sheer number of names and faces to keep track of is overwhelming at times.

Dakota Johnson and Julianne Nicholson play the long-suffering significant others of Jimmy and John, respectively, given little to do but cry and kvetch. David Harbour is John's tainted wingman. Kevin Bacon and Adam Scott are skeptical FBI honchos who crave the intelligence Jimmy provides but suspect they're being played.

Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane and W. Earl Brown play Jimmy's core crew, whom we first meet as aged turncoats giving testimony against him. Corey Stoll is the upstanding new prosecutor who finally starts to ask questions about the Jimmy/FBI arrangement. Juno Temple is a wide-eyed streetwalker who shows up just in time to leave. Peter Sarsgaard turns up as a twitchy accomplice who practically seems to have the mark of doom etched on his forehead.

Most ill-used is Benedict Cumberbatch as Jimmy's brother Billy Bulger, a state senator a political power player who somehow managed to maintain a close relationship with his mobster sibling while (the film would have us believe) staying completely and deliberately oblivious of his business.

All these people waltz in and out of the frame, wah-wahing through Boston accents that seem lacquered on like all the dark wood constantly occupying the movie's backgrounds. Each actor has a scene or two to establish their character's bona fides, then dissolves into the other furnishings.

"Black Mass" was built as a movie to feature Johnny Depp in a dominating, unforgettable performance. At this it succeeds, but to the detriment of the total cinematic experience.

Review: "Fifty Shades of Grey"

Honestly, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Which isn't to say it was any good, just not laugh-out-loud ridiculously dreadful.

Every few years Hollywood likes to get naughty. They'll make a big-profile movie with an overtly sexual angle and then milk it for all it's worth. "See? We're not afraid to push the envelope!"

Of course, most of these flicks end up being pretty tame. The best test is to wait a few years and see how it registers. Most likely people who bypassed the hullabaloo at the time will discover it's shown up on Netflix or what have you, watch it and think to themselves, "This is what all the fuss was about?"

Heck, remember when people got all boiled over about "Striptease"?

"Fifty Shades of Grey," based on the uber-popular book, is about a romance between an innocent young college girl and a billionaire with a taste for BDSM play. That stands for bondage, dominance and sadism-masochism -- I had to look it up -- which most people would just shorthand as bondage or S&M.

The book by E.L. James started out as fan fiction and is unread by me, but those who have tell me the writing is atrocious, including misspellings and bad grammar you rarely see in the mass publishing industry. Nonetheless, it's struck a chord with an overwhelmingly female audience, with it and its two sequels selling something like 100 million copies worldwide.

The story and dialogue are pretty goofy. It's the classic boy-meets-girl, boy-woos-girl, boy-wants-to-whip-girl-but-she's-not-so-sure-about-it kind of tale. They spend much of the movie discussing an actual contract to govern their sexual relationship, but somehow never get around to signing the thing and just go for it anyway.

(Attorneys will thus consider it a horror film.)

Everyone will want to know about the sex scenes, so let's go ahead and discuss that.

There are three -- well, four, with the last coming right on the heels of the third, so they kinda blend -- and there's a fair amount of flesh to be seen. We see a lot of her boobs and butt, and a whole bunch of sidal nudity where we imagine we might have gotten an oblique glimpse of the great-and-holy, but not really. He's also naked a lot, though not nearly as often, and somehow we don't really see very much of him -- certainly not a pickle shot, even a fabled and fleeting glimpse like Ben Affleck's peen in "Gone Girl."

Not surprisingly, the actors displaying all their wares are ones you've probably never heard of. Dakota Johnson plays Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan plays Christian Grey, and if those aren't the two most fake-sounding character names ever committed to paper, then I don't know what is.

You see, big stars don't like to show their bodies too much. Maybe they think it'll limit their careers, or they don't want to worry about it getting screencapped all over the web, or they just want to maintain a little bit of mystery around their persona.

You'll notice that even the rare ones that do prodigious nude scenes, like Ewan McGregor and Kate Winslet, tend to get kidded about it and then suddenly the kits stop coming off. Angelina Jolie used to drop trou all the time, and now we've had barely a hiney shot from her in the last decade. Maria Bello was Old Faithful for full frontal, and now she's making inspiring Disney flicks.

A young actor might do a daring nude scene to get noticed and launch their career, which is what I'm guessing Johnson and Dornan -- or at least their handlers -- are hoping for. Then they might have a cheeky scene (literally) or two as they're segueing into mainstream movies. But once they become a big box office draw or get nominated for an Oscar, the no-nudity clauses come out of the woodwork.

Maybe, if their star dims with time, they might do a nude scene for the sheer shock of it, but by then audiences are more interested in somebody else's niblets. This is known as the Meg Ryan effect. Finally, when they get old there's a possibility of a flash for sheer comic effect, like when Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas mooned us or Jack Nicholson walked in on Diane Keaton

Anyway, I guess I should talk about "Fifty Shades of Grey" some more, but I don't really feel like it. It's mildly sexy, at least the first time Christian blindfolds Anastasia with one of his ties and reaches for a leather riding crop. But mostly it's a bunch of talking about sex rather than doing it, false emotions and shitty dialogue.

I have no doubt this will big a big hit, because if even 20% of the people who read the book go see the movie, that's a lot of tickets. And clearly director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Kelly Marcel are setting us up for a sequel. Maybe we deserve it.

Review: "Need for Speed"

I like video games and I like cars and I like car racing video games and I certainly like movies, but I did not care for this movie based on a car racing video game.

The problem with "Need for Speed" is that it's a goofy flick with aspirations of being A Serious Drama, and those things don't really mix well. Much like the dreariest parts of the "Fast and Furious" franchise, whenever the characters aren't zipping around in souped-up machines, crashing and taunting each other, the movie gets stuck in neutral.

It is, in fact, much like a muscle car sitting in one place revving its engine very loudly: it seems kinda cool at first and certainly draws a lot of attention, but after a short time we get itchy to see the thing, y'know, go.

Aaron Paul, best known as the "bitch" guy from TV's "Breaking Bad," hasn't had much of a movie career -- though he had a strong supporting part in the indie drama "Smashed" from not long ago. He's got serious thespian chops, but this movie -- directed by Scott Waugh ("Act of Valor") with a screenplay by rookie George Gatins -- requires him to deliver a lot of ridiculous dialogue and smoldering stares that don't seem to have a whole heaping helping of intellect behind them.

I'm not saying Tobey Marshall is dumb, but he certainly acts pretty dumb.

Tobey runs a performance car shop in tiny Mount Kisco, New York (though Georgia and its ferocious film production tax credits stand in). His dad has recently died, the shop isn't doing well, but he's got an amiable crew of mechanics/best buds (Ramon Rodriguez, Scott Mescudi, Rami Malek, Harrison Gilbertson) to help pass the time.

They contrive to set up elaborate street racing events, including a guy monitoring traffic from a Cessna in the sky, though the cops are seemingly nowhere to be found. Tobey is the top dog on this little circuit, but he's never had a car good enough to make it to the Big Time, where here is defined as an annual underground race of supercars called the Deleon.

This race is organized by a secretive billionaire named Monarch (Michael Keaton), who reputedly was once a great racer himself but a bad ticker made him quit. Now he sits in a room full of tech gear, delivering daily vodcasts in which he encourages and/or rags on drivers, with an exclusive invite to the Deleon as catnip. Apparently, every single gearhead in the country tunes into Monarch, though law enforcement has not yet paid him any notice. Strange, that.

Here's where things get screwy. The prize for the winner of the Deleon is he gets to keep all the other racers' cars. Of course, if you've every actually played the Need for Speed games or seen any car movie ever, you know that most of the vehicles end up as smoking roadkill.

(Maybe Monarch got so rich because he never has to put up any prize money, and his only major expenses are Web hosting fees.)

The heavy is Dominic Cooper as Dino Brewster, a teen rival of Tobey's who stole his girl (Dakota Johnson) and made it out of their dink town to race on the Indy circuit, which of course begs the question of why he bothers with illegal street races that likely pay a small fraction of his legitimate racing income.

Whatever. Cooper is an appropriately sneering, contemptuous presence.

The Deleon actually ends up as largely an afterthought, as most of the film's running time is concerned with the initial face-off between Tobey and Dino, during which Very Bad Things happen, and then Tobey's race to drive across country in time to make it for Monarch's little to-do in California. The "race before the race" has all sorts of roadway encounters, including incompetent cops, murderous rednecks in trucks and a rescue off the end of a cliff that is just completely preposterous.

Imogen Poots plays Julia, a British car expert who tags along with Tobey for reasons that are never made entirely clear, other than just to have an adorable chick around. The movie's third main star is a special silver Ford Mustang, supposedly the car Carroll Shelby was working on with Ford before he died, which Tobey and his crew finish into a 234-mile-per-hour beast.

Of course, driving a custom-built car 3,000 miles across country at high speeds is a really great way to mess up the engine right before a big race, but "Need for Speed" is not the sort of movie to bother with verisimilitude. The 'Stang is pretty awesome, though I thought the '68 Gran Torino Tobey drives in the initial race even cooler.

The racing sequences are the best thing about the movie, as Waugh & Co. eschew over-the-top computer generated mayhem for practical car stunts, which give these scenes a certain amount of verve and heft.

The talkie parts, though, are so cumbersome, and eat up an astonishing portion of the film's overlong 140-minute run time.

At one point, Tobey and Dino finally have a face-off inside a hotel prior to their race, which involves lots of shoving and grappling and strained threats. "We'll settle this behind the wheel!" Tobey snarls, because that's where every car movie ends. All things considered, though, a punch in the nose would have been quicker, safer and more satisfying.

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