Fifty shades of trash

Rating: 1/10 (19 March 2016)

The plot is idiotic. An intelligent well educated college senior interview a handsome rich guy and falls for him. He is a nut case who does "not make love. {He} f*cks, hard." He also is a sadist. He won't let his women touch him. OK, maybe our co-ed likes that. Except that she is a virgin until she sleeps with this guy. She also has nothing in common with him. She is a romantic, he isn't. She likes to do things together, he doesn't. The two of them don't do anything together except have sex, don't talk about anything except how screwed up he is. What a deep and exciting relationship. Just the kind of guy an intelligent well-educated college senior would fall in love with. You betcha.
Our guy also has built some gigantic business empire even though he is only in his twenties. Recent examples of that are quite rare and involve people who produced new things, such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Not our guy. He says that business is based on knowing people, and he knows people. Apparently my more than 30 years of teaching in a business school was all misguided. I was under the impression, and taught others, that entrepreneurship, inventiveness, management skills, finance, risk assessment, and productivity were among the important things that determined business success. All irrelevant as long as you know people, it seems. The usual Hollywood stupidity about what business is, what business does, and how business works.
Our guy is more than just a business whiz. He has done it while overcoming a crack-head mother and an abusive childhood. He also plays classical piano brilliantly. He flies a helicopter and also glider planes. He's tough as nails in his business dealings, but under it all he has a heart of gold, giving tons of money to noble charities. One hackneyed angle after another.
Now about the sex scenes. Plenty of nudity and some SM. When you strip out the Hollywood crap and phony baloney garbage, what you have is the core of the movie - simple SM pornography, though actually not much of it. What's this junk doing getting ratings on IMDb? Does IMDb also rate stag films and Hollywood starlets' sex tapes? If it rates this pile of dung, why not those, or to turn that around, if not those, then why this?
The ending isn't really an ending. It leaves the relationship between our hero (?) and heroine (?) hanging and is an obvious come-on for a sequel, of which I understand there are to be two. The development of those is obvious from the story line in this one. The basic line will be that our hero will be tormented by his love for our heroine, and in the end she will re-make him and save him from himself. An SM-porn version of Pretty Woman, I guess, stretched out into three installments. Sounds awful. This one sure was.