Hacker Cinema
Fifty Shades of Grey
2015 · Film · 125 min
Part of Fifty Shades Collection
Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson
When college senior Anastasia Steele steps in for her sick roommate to interview prominent businessman Christian Grey for their campus paper, little does she realize the path her life will take. Christian, as enigmatic as he is rich and powerful, finds himself strangely drawn to Ana, and she to him. Though sexually inexperienced, Ana plunges headlong into an affair -- and learns that Christian's true sexual proclivities push the boundaries of pain and pleasure.
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>Aliens was Alien fanfiction
Just because an established Hollywood director was a fan of the first Alien movie does make his script for Alien's sequel "fan fiction".
Cameron had already written and directed The Terminator when the owners of the Alien franchise chose his script for the sequel.
(Fifty Shades of Grey in contrast really did originate as fan fiction.)
> multi-award winning, widely-praised, multiple adaptations, massive cultural impact and so on
Can say the same about about Marvel movies and Fifty Shades of Grey.
> but if you're going to go out of your way to hyperbolise then don't be surprised if you get pushback on it.
I simply wrote that I think it sucks but don't support banning it.
As for surprise at screeching over tedium, who could be at this day and age. I already said I insist on your right to awful taste and screeching - just not at me. Begone to your Oprah's Book Club schlock you absolute philistines :P
Depends on one's goals. Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are formulaic as hell and rack incredible amounts of money.
Anybody who just wants to write can drop their thoughts on a blog and call it a day. People who want to make money writing have to account for shaping the message to part people from their dollars.
Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fanfiction. In that form it couldn't be marketed. A few name changes and some reframing and it has sold over 150 million copies.
I recently switched to the DVD plan. I watched Fifty Shades of Grey on Amazon Prime and wanted to watch the 2 sequels, but Amazon wanted $15 each. Since I mainly want to watch movies, it's a lot easier to find something to watch on the DVD plan rather than streaming, which is focused more on TV shows with episodes.
I need to get back to tending my DVD collection. When Netflix axes their DVD service, I'll use my own private collection for entertainment.
> I'm pretty sure that Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't successful for its story, but for discussing sex and specifically BDSM in a more open way than what was previously seen in "mainstream" movies.
And because it feeded from the Twilight-Hype, on which it was a juicy twist. For itself it probably would never have become such a success.
> but you could say exactly the same thing about Minecraft, DOOM
Can we? Minecraft feeds mainly on its powerful sandboxing and modability, which other games still can't really match today, while also still getting regular updates. And doom as a franchise continued to move forward and created new games. They don't remain successful just because their first versions were awesome at the time, but because they continued to output awesome successors.
This is very different from classics which are usually frozen in time and stay classics despite getting no updates at all.
> “Fifty Shades of Grey” was completely criticized on all fronts by reviewers, but still became one of the top bestsellers. > [...] > Most of the stories created today are low-quality ones. And that was always so. Only when we look at the past creations, we can only experience those that were good enough to be preserved.
I'm pretty sure that Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't successful for its story, but for discussing sex and specifically BDSM in a more open way than what was previously seen in "mainstream" movies.
Overall, a lot of works that, on the surface, aren't very impressive by current standards, but still managed to stand out in a novel way. Fifty shades and Half Life are two examples, but you could say exactly the same thing about Minecraft, DOOM, most of the classical movies, most of the old "legendary" cars and a lot more. Things don't become classics by standing the test of time - if you discount nostalgia, a lot of "classical" stuff is crap by todays standard -, but by founding the genre they're later beaten in.
Fifty Shades of Grey is one of the best selling books of all time. Almost all the women your age have read it or seen the film. You should too.
One could probably cite the immense popularity of Fifty shades of gray. It's supposed to be "BDSM themed", but actually, it's just a story about an abusive relationship build on "great sex" [0].
Most people familiar with BDSM practices/norms hate those books/movies with a passion due to how they misrepresent BDSM like it's just an abusive relationship.
The article also quotes a 2000 paper about consent by legal scholar Robin West [1], imho it's relevant to the discussion at hand as it argues that even violent and abusive marriages are often traceable back to acts of consent by the woman.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/02/consent-isnt-enough-in-fifty-shades-of-grey/385267/
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1847983
Okay I completely understand the concept of the post and get the sadness and humor all at the same time. In an era where attentiveness and long-form reading seems to be in distinct decline, distinctions within the marketplace losing meaning hurts. I'm sure customers will eventually adapt though...but this quote:
>I wrote this post because I’m tired of vanity titles and success without quality.
...just makes me laugh, because we're talking about an industry that most recently is probably the most guilty of "success without quality" by way of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise and all the buckets and buckets of money it made. Self-help being a juggernaut of sales year after year. Obvious derivative slop like Pride and Prejudice & Zombies and the wish-fulfillment nostalgia collage of Ready Player One aren't bringing a new enlightenment to society, practically speaking.
>I hope my story illustrates that the best marketing tactic you can use for a book is to write a great book that actually sells over the long term.
Actually, it kind of illustrates the opposite, in that "a book uploaded every five minutes" isn't a signal-to-noise ratio that really makes much of any sense. The only reason to write a quality book is vanity at this point.
The day that an entity - a startup, a publisher, a legacy firm - can figure out how to intelligently and profitably cull 'good quality' new artists from the loads and loads of self-publishing writers, musicians, or cinema/visual creators out there on their own and bring viewers is the day artists and audiences probably start meeting the monetization in the middle.
It's true that on the surface, this schism seems absurd. However, I believe there's a little more nuance to it than you realize.
Middle-class parents in a low crime neighborhood don't really have to worry about young Sally growing up to be a psychotic warrior because they to occasionally watch blockbuster movies like 300 or Saving Private Ryan.
But if family movie night regularly included films like Eyes Wide Shut or Fifty Shades of Grey, one can certainly imagine it may influence a young adult's sexuality. And at a time when they are exceptionally impressionable and have particularly poor judgement no less. This is an unsettling thought to most parents.
That said, I do believe that Americans generally overexpose their children to bombastic, violent movies. I'm certain that this has something to do with our relatively higher violent crime rates. I'm not sure if our media shapes our collective consciousness or the other way around. I suspect it's both.