Presumably a portion of the HE readership was moved to see Fifty Shades of Grey this weekend, most likely as a Valentine’s Day concession to the girlfriend or wife. Here’s my review again, but please have at it yourselves. In the meantime here are my five favorite excerpts from Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review:

(1) “If the figures are correct, ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’, by E. L. James, has been bought by more than a hundred million people, of whom only twenty million were under the impression that it was a paint catalogue. That leaves a solid eighty million or so who, upon reading sentences such as ‘He strokes his chin thoughtfully with his long, skilled fingers,’ had to lie down for a while and let the creamy waves of ecstasy subside.”

(2) “When Christian, alarmed by Ana’s maidenhood, considers ‘rectifying the situation,’ she replies, ‘I’m a situation?’ — a sharp rejoinder, although if I were her I’d be much more worried about the rectifying.”

(3) “’I’ve always been good at people,’ he says, as though people were Scrabble or squash. He is interested in ‘what motivates them, what incentivizes them.’ Any woman should run a mile from a man who uses the verb ‘incentivize,’ but things could have been worse, I guess. He could have said ‘monetize.'”

(4) “Yet we should not begrudge E. L. James her triumph, for she has, in her lumbering fashion, tapped into a truth that often eludes more elegant writers — that eternal disappointment, deep in the human heart, at the failure of our loved ones to acquire their own helipad.”

(5) “Check out the Red Room: rack upon rack of cutting-edge bullwhips, a variety of high-end ass paddles, and more restraining cuffs than you can shake a stick at. And how much of this kit gets used? A mere fraction, and even then Christian, supposedly the maestro of pain, can do little more than brush his cat-o’-nine-tails over Ana’s flesh with a feathery backhand. He looks like Roger Federer, practicing gentle cross-court lobs at the net.”