By Preston Wilder
There are several reasons to review Fifty Shades of Black and How to Be Single together. Both are (allegedly) comedies. One stars Marlon Wayans, the other co-stars Damon Wayans Jr. How to Be Single features Dakota Johnson, who played the heroine in Fifty Shades of Grey – which of course is what’s being spoofed in Fifty Shades of Black. But the most important reason is that both are films released worldwide in 2016 (as opposed to holdovers from 2015), meaning they’re February releases – and it’s a cliché that February releases are the bottom of the barrel, quietly allowed to escape while the world isn’t looking.
That cliché certainly holds true with the almost unwatchable Fifty Shades, a crude parade of dick jokes, tasteless jokes, sexist jokes and even more dick jokes. The noble penis is much-discussed here, from the relative merits of long/skinny/thick to a line about whether touching a penis makes you gay (answer? only if you like it) – even before we get an extreme close-up (!) of cartoonishly swollen testicles. There are jokes about sniffing male genitals, handling them and even tasting them. Vaginas get off relatively scot-free, though one does get described as “flapping around like an inflatable figure outside a supermarket”.
Are these jokes grossing you out? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet – and I hope you never do. There are also frequent jokes about how ugly/hairy/stinky our heroine is (she’s actually played with a modicum of dignity by Kali Hawk, described on the Internet Movie Database as a former child prodigy), jokes about films both good (Whiplash) and bad (Radio), plus torn-from-the-headlines jokes which is where the film becomes mildly interesting. For all its vile awfulness it has a certain Time-capsule value, standing as a record that folks in 2016 (at least in the States, and online) were talking about Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump and Bill Cosby. There’s even a joke about Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades of Grey, with Wayans – who also co-wrote the script – having the temerity to criticise that film for sexism: “She had to be naked the whole f***in’ movie! That s**t was just gratuitous!”. Seriously?
Dakota Johnson is actually much better than the films she appears in, whether it’s S&M-themed blockbusters or sub-Sex and the City rom-coms about four single women in NYC. How to Be Single (which opens on Friday) belongs in the latter category, with a script by the people who wrote He’s Just Not That Into You directed by the guy who made Love, Rosie – but this hugely unpromising set-up ends up surprisingly watchable, partly because of some mild chuckles but mostly because the performers (especially Johnson and Leslie Mann) largely avoid Katherine Heigl-style simpering, bringing some legitimate pain and fear of loneliness to this new quartet of singletons.
Some of the jokes are crude, of course. Talk of “dicksand” belongs in Fifty Shades of Black, ditto a disquisition on a bushy bush (it’s “like Gandalf looking out at you”, apparently). But we also get the scene where Dakota – the kind of klutz who has trouble unzipping her dress – impulsively bursts into tears when her ex comes to her new flat and casually turns off the Spanish closed captions on her TV, which she’s been trying to do for days (“You’re so handy!” she sobs, as the guy looks bewildered). And we also get the scene where Mann – as Dakota’s older, career-minded sister – tries to warn off a younger man who, unaccountably, seems to fancy her, talking to him sadly of her older-person hip problems, “not from fun things like having sex, but from … gravity”.
The other two ladies are unhappily-single Alison Brie, who places her faith in the internet and uses a bowl of peanuts to explain why it’s hard to find a good man even among eight million New Yorkers, and happily-single, addle-brained Rebel Wilson who gets drunk, has casual sex, cures a hangover by snorting Tylenol, and pees in Leslie’s kitty litter when she wakes up wasted (“That’s a Zen garden!” “The cat has a Zen garden?”). She’s just comic relief, of course – it doesn’t even make sense that she should be hanging out with the others – and recedes in the second half when the film admittedly gets a bit insufferable. Even here, however, in the bits which only a chick-flick obsessive could love, there’s a certain fascination, laying out the basic dilemma of the modern female urbanite: “I can handle all this by myself, I’m an independent woman… (Pause) But I don’t want to!”. You can hate How to Be Single (though hopefully not Dakota Johnson) for all kinds of reasons, and you’d have a point – but I’ve seen worse, in fact I’ve seen hugely and immeasurably worse. Welcome to February.
FIFTY SHADES OF BLACK (zero stars)
DIRECTED BY Michael Tiddes
STARRING Marlon Wayans, Kali Hawk, Mike Epps
US 2016 92 mins
HOW TO BE SINGLE **
DIRECTED BY Christian Ditter
STARRING Dakota Johnson, Alison Brie, Leslie Mann, Rebel Wilson
US 2016 110 mins
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