REVIEW: FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

'Taylor-Wood has taken great care in the casting of her heroine: soft of voice, absent-minded of manner, Johnson manages to spill into scenes seeming both sleepy and flustered at the same time, as if she had gone to bed the night before knowing she was to star in a movie mainstreaming the pleasures of bondage porn, but had overslept and was now keen to get up to speed. What Christian does like to do — or certainly what he talks endlessly about doing, drawing up 20-page contracts which elaborate in power-point detail what he would like to do, if allowed — is to be found in what he calls his “play room”: red-velvet-lined vaulted deep in his penthouse kitted out with slings, harnesses, handcuffs, whips, and all manner of equipment seemingly on loan from the local circus.   “I thought you meant your x-box and stuff, says Anastasia, fuelling the delicious sense that both she and her director are in eye-rolling cahoots together against the resolute humorlessness of James’s book.  “Two things. I don’t make love. I fuck. Hard,” he tells her, leveling her with a particularly intense eyebrow-piercer.   “And the second?”  asks Anastasia, after a pause of such sustained magnificence that it hard not to fall just a little bit in love with her. I’m not sure how Johnsons’ career as the willing partner in middle-of-the-road sadomachistic fantasy is going to shape up, but somebody out to cast her in a comedy immediately.'  

— from my review of Fifty Shades of Grey for Intelligent Life