Trendy Movie Buzz: Fifty Shades of Grey

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few months, you must be aware about the incessant buzz surrounding the steamy novel by British novelist E.L. James – Fifty Shades of Grey.

The story focuses on the fiery relationship between a somewhat naïve college graduate, Anastasia Steele and a successful young corporate raider, Christian Grey. After internalizing the novel, it’s fairly easy to see why this piece of literature is garnering the attention of Hollywood’s hottest and brightest, including Angelina Jolie, Alexander Skarsgard, and even Bret Ellison, who penned American Psycho, another novel with similar extreme and erotic tendencies. Ellison is eager to produce the screenplay and publicly declared his desire in a statement: “I’m putting myself out there to write the movie adaptation of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’…”

Major movie studios were engaged in a formidable bidding war for the film rights, and then it was finally announced this past March that Universal Pictures and Focus Features came out victorious.

So now it’s just a matter of casting and being armed with a vividly enamoring script that will capture the sensual spirit and emotional depths of the story in a fluid and captivating way.

All those elements can be a challenge to facilitate and translate to the big screen but it can be done. American Psycho, directed by Mary Harron was a witty and elaborately heightened portrayal of a character mentally disintegrating as he assumed the role of a social parasite. Of course it didn’t hurt that Christian Bale embodied Patrick Bateman with a level of brilliance that is still unparalled.

Hopefully Fifty Shades of Grey will enjoy the same cult status that American Psycho has acquired. The sexually explicit themes have already helped the novel and the other two titles in the series (Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed) initiate staggering sales worldwide. Surpassing even the unbeatable giant – Harry Potter.

This is definitely a project worth keeping tabs on.