Surprisingly Deep Between the Sex Scenes (and During)

Rating: 10/10 (14 February 2015)

I had low expectation, so I was delighted (as a result?) to find that the movie actually had me thinking philosophically, and moved me emotionally (primarily the female character). The depiction of the male protagonist was thin, but the depiction of the female had depth and was outstanding, and the sex scenes artfully done (and amusing when noticing the ways they kept it an 'R' rating).
The movie is as good a Hollywood gets (which, on a life scale, is about a '4') - but that is no fault of this movie - since it accurately reflects the deficiencies of our current cultural mindset (in all its deplorable un-glory), especially concerning sex - it depicts (by default) where our culture fails - on the art front and on the romantic/beauty front - where you live in a world where base sex is the norm. Here, they hit on three of the four crucial ingredients - mind-numbing physical attraction, the human-only high art possibilities, and the romance (which the story presents as THE main conflict). It misses on the 'miracle of new life' ingredient (but then there are two more installments - and I can't remember how the book ends), but then so does our current society, so not fault to the movie or story.
I 'listened' to the entire series in the car (my wife played the audiobook for me on long car trips), and I can authoritatively say that this movie takes the critical, and artful, qualities up many notches - it was not aimed at the housewife humping the washing machine - and it was restrained in plot tamperings (which is the norm for movies - but understandably, since it is hard to keep a creative screen writer down).
I see a lot of '1' reviews - which reflects the juvenile (and sheep-like) nature of the reviewers rather than the actual quality of the movie, which was a 10.