50 Shades of Grey

So I never did read the books, but I finally got to watch the movie. Normally, I'm a book girl all the way, but I have realized that my life's reading is going to consist of state codes and SOP's (for me, that admission was tantamount to accepting that the sun won't rise tomorrow).

I don't know what I was expecting, but I was disappointed. Maybe I was looking for it to rekindle something in me, and it certainly did lead to some realizations, just not in the manner I had thought that it would.

Since I like to file my complaints before anything else...

Could they have picked any two characters with less chemistry? I mean seriously, the spark between them was tantamount to my attraction to the pile of dirty dishes in the sink--c'mon baby lets get it on, you know you want to do me!
With a playroom that cool, how come they're hardly ever in it?
On what planet does a dom spend that much time going down on a sub and she never ever ever reciprocates??
Who was really supposed to be in charge? From where I'm standing, it sure looked a hell of a lot like her.
Where exactly was the D/s? Hottest moment in the whole thing was when he made her eat. Seriously.
Her character made me want to beat her myself, and normally that's just not my bent--she was a raging brat.
According to Alpha, "Mr. Grey is a pussy with consistency issues and a serious lack of self control"...His commentary would have been quite annoying if I hadn't agreed with him.
What exactly is with the implication that Grey is the way he is because there's something deeply wrong with him, due to past abusive experiences? I found her mission to fix him painfully annoying. For me, that is one of the attractions of a dominant--you don't "fix" them, you don't change them, you don't make them what they're not. They are who they are, they want what they want, and they do what they do. As a sub, you accept that and allow yourself to be molded to fit whatever shape they take, somehow fitting the acceptance of that molding into the knowledge that nobody else will accept you for who you are in quite the same way.

For me, a big part of D/s is that acceptance of who someone is beyond all the trappings of what people think that we should be.

I wonder at the mass appeal the story seems to have. I was a bit shocked by how tame it was.

Enter realizations...

Tame. 50 Shades of Grey was painfully tame, and dare I say, not far beyond the borders of vanilla. I get that maybe it was a whole, "introduce her gently" thing, and it seems to have been somewhat of an awakening phenomenon for a lot of women, but still...I don't really get it.

Maybe I was disappointed in what I perceived as a distinct lack of actual D/s in the story and maybe I was hoping for it to spark something in me that has lain quiet through these last months of insanity. It didn't do that. But it did show me that maybe I'm not as far gone as I feel because there's still more D/s in a moment of my life than in an hour of that story. So for that, despite my disappointment, I do have an appreciation for 50 Shades of Grey.