Fucking Day: Old Fashioned

Several years ago, I wrote an article for a website that has died of dysentery about the Fifty Shades Of Grey movies and how they actually reinforce some pretty puritanical views about sex. The main character's superpower is somehow maintaining her virginity despite her hotness, and most of the bad guys are former sexual partners of the male lead who are jealous.

I don't think the woman who wrote under the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon considered the overall themes of her story before she started writing Fifty Shades, but since it's based on the Twilight novels, which were based on a Mormon woman's sex dream, it's work that was created through a game of sexual repression telephone and it shows.

Yet it was still TOO sexy for a particular crowd. So, in 2015 a small production company decided to open their movie Old Fashioned the same weekend as Fifty Shades and market it as a "christian alternative" to Snowqueens Icedragon's fanfiction. I can't stress how little plot there would be with the sex removed from Fifty Shades. It would be a film about a woman who…is a woman. There's nothing else but sex and setups for sex. It's like presenting a Christian version of Naughty Nurses 12, where the nurses are just nice and good at their jobs.

Old Fashioned doesn't share much plot with Fifty Shades of Grey. No one gets spanked even a little bit. It's about a man named Clay, not "Christian" like in that other movie, who is a reformed college radio shock jock. During his bad boy days, he once made a Girls Gone Wild style video called BRAD and CLAY doin' their LEGIT SHENANIGANS: UNCENSORED COLLEGE COEDS X-posed, which is just a fantastic title for a Christian movie's version of softcore erotic content. Sorry, a LEGIT title.

"How legit were their shenanigans?" you might be wondering. They were probably pretty legit, because later in the movie, Clay's love interest sits in the dark and watches this legit erotica while sobbing. No one has ever been sadder to see nipples.

After cheating on his college girlfriend, Clay decided the only way to keep his incredible horniness in check was to go full Mike Pence and never be alone in a room with a woman. He is Old Fashioned and also the antique store he runs is called Old Fashioned. It’s clever, you see.

The actor who portrays Clay also wrote and directed the movie, which means he is terrible at doing all of those things. Every scene in this movie is underscored by cheesy guitar music. No matter what is happening, there's a constant strumming of acoustic guitar that almost drowns out the dialogue as if the movie is trying to recreate the experience of watching it in a college dorm room while the guy next door is painfully trying to learn a Weezer song.

His love interest, Amber, not "Anna" like in that secular sex romp, has the backstory of someone on the FBI's most-wanted list. She drives from town to town until she runs out of gas and then lives wherever she lands until she saves up enough money to drive again. She’s a manic pixie dream criminal.

Amber rents an apartment from Clay and has a series of run-ins with him as he does minor repairs. During each of these repair trips, he makes her wait outside in the cold because he refuses to be alone with her, and for some unfathomable reason she is attracted to that.

You can feel the struggle of this movie to understand what women like about Christian Grey other than the boning, so they can create a Christ-loving bad boy as their hero. The thing is, if you remove the billions of dollars and "crazy" "depraved" sexual habits of Christian Grey, he's just a regular creepy guy.

Clay's wardrobe is two black hoodies he cycles back and forth between for the entire movie because that seems like a thing the poor version of Christian Grey would wear. The appealing thing about Christianity to most people is the sense of community religion provides, but Christian Grey is a loner, so Clay doesn't even go to church because he thinks his local church is full of hypocrites.

Almost everyone thinks Clay is a weirdo because Christian Grey doesn't have a lot of friends. Every time Amber talks to someone about Clay, they're like, "Ew, that guy? He sucks." And she decides to date him anyway. Anastasia works in a hardware store in Fifty Shades, so for their first date, Amber takes Clay to a hardware store where they purchase an ax!

Amber has Clay chop some wood for a fire, and they roast marshmallows as the core of the date because hardware stores may not be romantic, but they have to get in as many recognizable scenes from Fifty Shades as they can. It's suddenly occurred to me that someone had to be very familiar with the plot of Fifty Shades of Grey to write this movie. It's possible Old Fashioned exists because someone got caught with erotica and was like, "I...its research! For a…a…Christian version! I will save people's souls from this horrible sinful text by reading it, understanding it... especially the buttplug chapter. I gotta read that a LOT."

So, Clay and Amber are dating in the way he wants to date, which means visiting a pastor and getting a book called Red, Yellow, Green About Dating. I think this is a nod to Christian and Anna's safe words "yellow" and "red" in Fifty Shades. Man, somebody researched this so hard. Even though Amber isn't particularly religious, she agrees to Red, Yellow, Green the shit out of Clay, which means dating with the intent of getting married and not having any physical contact -which includes kissing except for on the cheek- until their wedding day.

We see several dates between the two. Clay's idea of a date is forcing Amber to force feed pears to his friend's daughter so he can judge whether or not she would be a good mother. Hot. Amber plans a date where they walk around town, and Clay tells her a dress that she likes in the window of a shop is too expensive. Amber loves this. Fucking so hot.

Clay has two friends from his former college DJ days he still hangs around. Both of them think he is the most annoying man on earth. One of Clay's friends, Brad, is still a radio shock jock who's so successful he is moving to LA to get syndicated. His show is about how women are stupid. I say this because he literally opens a show by saying, "Women are stuuuuuuupid." That's the level of discourse it takes to get a syndicated radio talk show in this universe, which is, yeah, pretty accurate to real life. I have no complaints about that.

Brad is pretty unimportant to the plot except that he hires a stripper for Clay's only other friend's bachelor party, and Clay gets very mad and plays an intense game of solo basketball about it which is really funny. There's this dark, dramatic music playing, and I feel like he's gotten so horny he has to basketball his feelings out.

After the stripper incident, Clay is in a bad mood, and for some reason, Amber starts pressuring him to say he finds her attractive, and he's like, "No, I cannot reveal whether or not I am attracted to you; until we are married." She then tries to kiss him, and he reacts as though he's either repulsed by her or terrified that a geyser of cum is going to erupt from all of his pores.

Amber also takes this opportunity to tell Clay that she's slept with five men, and if you count "heavy petting" four more, go Amber, AND that she was married for two years when she was nineteen. Clay, visionary auteur director of BRAD and CLAY doin' their LEGIT SHENANIGANS: UNCENSORED COLLEGE COEDS X-Posed, finds this to be too much sex for an adult woman to have had, so they break up.

It's very important that Amber and Clay never kiss. There are a few dire warnings against kissing in this movie. At one point Clay asks an older man who frequents his antique store how he knew his wife was the one and the guy tells a tragic story about how a single kiss led to his unhappy marriage because he couldn't break up with his wife without feeling guilty about the sin of their lip skin brushing in 1971. So goddamn fucking hot.

Newly single Amber flirts with Brad at a bar without knowing it's him. She goes back to his hotel room for her dark moment dramatic climax, and I have to say this is one thing the movie truly gets correct. Fucking a DJ is a real low point for so many women. Luckily, Amber doesn't even kiss Brad because, as we've established, every kiss in this universe is the Godfather kiss of death. Clay's Aunt tells him to stop being so creepy and go propose to his girlfriend in the baby food aisle of the grocery store. So he does!

I don't even know what to say about this proposal. He fills a grocery store with sand for no reason. All I could think was Clay is definitely making that poor girl help clean up that sand later. And all of a sudden Clay is a hat guy? That whole look is such a specific choice that I do not understand. The funniest thing to me is there is a small band playing in the grocery store. However, they played some song the movie was unable to get the license to, or they couldn't record it at the quality that they wanted, so all of the members of the group are bobbing and swaying to a completely different beat than the included music. It's a tiny little touch of failure they didn't need to add, but did.

Anastasia Steel got a swimming pool full of flowers, so Amber Nolastnamenessecary had to have a grocery store full of sand? That’s the Christian version of flower pool? It’s…so…dry. Why is this the grossest thing I’ve ever written? This movie made me say "geyser of cum." I never thought I would write this, but Old Fashioned may be too horny. My God, my article about a movie, based on a movie, based on a book, based on another book, based on a sex dream, has compounded the horniness too much. I’m pretty sure if anyone ever bases a podcast on this article the world will explode. Oh no, shit, that's exactly the kind of thing we might do.

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