By Christine Crosby
Must admit I’ve not seen the movie yet, but below you’ll find a review from three grandmas who have.
When this grandma first heard about the book series FiftyShades of Grey, I must admit to being a tad uncomfortable, but then I attended my then 38 year-old daughter’s, book club meeting where the book was being reviewed, and it was a hoot! These ladies had put this book in perspective, found the humor and insights that it offered. I then read all three books in the series. By the way, I won’t be a spoiler, but unless you read the last book in the series, you won’t know the core message. Let’s just say, as a long time child abuse prevention advocate, everything fell into place after discovering how Mr. Grey came to be the way he was.
Back in 2012 when the original Fifty Shades of Grey book came out, GRAND Magazine asked Dr. Doree Lynn, a Georgetown based psychologist and author of Sex for Grownups to do a little review of the book for us. It was even mentioned on the cover of that issue – see Elvis cover (which caused a bit of a stir, because apparently, some people think once you’re a grandparent, you should forget about sex – Duh!). 
If you’d like to read Dr. Lynn’s article, just click here.
As Dr. Lynn advised, “Unprotected sex at any age is a behavior that needs to be stopped dead in its tracks before it stops us dead in ours. With age comes wisdom, not immunity, so use your wisdom wisely. Fifty Shades of Grey’s billionaire protagonist Christian Grey might not have to worry about his sexual fate or that of his submissive lover, but you do! Educate yourself, communicate with your partner, talk to your doctor, and then grab hold of the reins and rediscover your sexuality.
Now, on to the review of the movie by the three Grandmas written by By Meredith B. Kile
You might not want to go see Fifty Shades of Grey with your grandma, but what about hearing what someone else’s thought of the erotic blockbuster?
The film adaptation of E.L. James’ best-selling BDSM novels broke box office records Presidents’ Day Weekend, raking in over $80 million dollars and ranking among the top-opening R-rated films of all time.
It’s a commercial success, but the critics are still out, so ET sought the opinions of three adventurous grandmas, who have previously reviewed Kim Kardashian’s sex tape, to the delight of their Internet fans.
So what did Teresa Dahlquist, Josie Cavalluzzi, and Mary Bartnicki think of Fifty Shades of Grey?
“Way too much T and A,” Dahlquist, who gave the the movie a 4 out of 10 rating, told ET’s Brooke Anderson.
“It was a little too graphic for me so I walked out,” admitted Cavalluzzi, who gave the movie a 5 out of 10 rating. “Then I walked back in. The music was good, so I closed my eyes and listened to the music. The score was excellent.”
Bartnicki was the only grandma who truly loved the film, giving it a 9.5 out of 10 and maintaining that the adaptation stayed mostly true to the source material, though she had some casting notes.
“It was pretty close,” said Bartnicki. “But he [Jamie Dornan] was miscast, I hate to say that.”
“You can’t take the fact away that he was handsome, he’s a gorgeous guy,” Cavalluzzi agreed. “But I don’t think this was the part for him.”
They may not have loved it, but for the most part, the grandmas weren’t taken aback by the film’s racy nature.
“We’re lucky we’ve experienced good lovemaking in our lives,” Dahlquist told Anderson.
“We did everything but got whipped!” Cavalluzzi laughed.
As for their favorite parts of the film?
“When she said that she was a virgin and he looks her,” said Cavalluzzi. “Then he really wanted her and then he grabbed her. I liked that part.”
Bartnicki said her favorite moments were some of the infamous elevator scenes: “When he first kissed her, it was like ‘Wow, finally!'”
Dahlquist told Anderson that she liked the scene when Christian gives Anastasia a new car, joking that “she had earned it, because they had just done it right before.”
BTW – Did you ever wonder about Gray vs. Grey
Gray and grey are different spellings of the same word, and both are used throughout the English-speaking world. But gray is more common in American English, while grey is more common in all the other main varieties of English. In the U.K., for instance, grey appears about twenty times for every instance of gray. In the U.S. the ratio is reversed.
Both spellings, which have origins in the Old English grǽg, have existed hundreds of years.1 Grey gained ascendancy in all varieties of English in the early 18th century, but its dominance as the preferred form was checked when American writers adopted gray about a century later. As the Ngram below shows, this change in American English came around 1825. Since then, both forms have remained fairly common throughout the English-speaking world, but the favoring of gray in the U.S. and grey everywhere else has remained consistent.