The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds.
Every morning for the past few weeks, as I wait for the bus to the office, I’ve been confronted with a video billboard urging me not to miss the climax of the Fifty Shades trilogy. And now today is the great day! Fifty Shades Freed has finally hit the theaters.
It seems so long since the innocent days of 2015 when the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey was first thrust upon us. Well, actually by that point, we’d already had four years of necktie restraints and ben wa balls and shitty prose, and it had all kind of lost its shock value, but hey, a movie! Featuring Jamie Dornan’s abs! And so Reader critic J.R. Jones forced himself to do his duty. “I’ve never done S-M,” he confessed, “but I must be some kind of masochist, because I read all 500 poorly written pages of Fifty Shades of Grey.”
And then Jones boldly ventured to the IMAX theater by himself at 10:30 AM on a Saturday and found himself the only person in a 369-seat theater.
For a while I toyed with the idea of pulling my coat up over my lap and pleasuring myself during one of the sex scenes; you couldn’t ask for a better writing hook, and Pee-wee Herman would be green with envy.
Don’t miss the climax!