Joel Fry-days: Difficult Second Coming: Episode 1 – “Grassroots Shit” (2016)

Joel Fry was in a couple episodes of this short web series. First impressions? Kind of amusing but hasn’t pulled me in yet. We’ll see how it goes.

In the 21st century, the Son of God returns as a stressed London millennial. JC wants to ease the suffering in the world, but He has a hard time wrangling His unruly flatmates/possible disciples(?) to give Him a hand.

That’s basically the bit, modern-day Jesus in a world where no one cares. In this episode, JC tries His hand at feeding the hungry and healing the overdosed, but nothing really goes according to plan. The series leans into awkward humor and the irony of, for instance, someone accusing JC of being a pervert when He lays hands on them to heal them.

Dylan Edwards directs, co-writes, and stars as JC. After a brief opening scene at the flat, we mainly see Him with Matthew Aubrey’s Carl, an annoying disciple who hangs onto JC’s coattails without actually doing much to help the less fortunate.

Joel Fry plays Mark, another of JC’s flatmates. Mark is that friend who doesn’t have it together—all party drugs, bad nutrition habits, and underdeveloped adulting skills. When JC is looking for volunteers to help Him pass out food to the homeless, He looks at Mark and just shakes His head, not even bothering to ask him.

Although Fry only appears briefly in the episode, he’s fun in it. He gives us an immediate picture of Mark when he trudges into the kitchen eating toothpaste after staying up all night (because “peppermint settles the stomach, innit?”) I’m not sold on the series yet, but I enjoy Mark.

First impressions:

Accent Watch

London.

Recommend?

In General – Not necessarily. Mildly amusing, but it doesn’t grab me that much.

Joel Fry – Maybe. I’ll report back once I’ve seen more of him in this role!

Warnings

Language (including the R-word,) drug use, and thematic elements. 

Other Doctor Lives: W1A: Series 2, Episode 3 (2015)

*Episode premise spoilers*

It’s interesting—Twenty Twelve paints Ian as a well-meaning but largely ineffectual man trying to steer a massive ship. Faced with some crises, he just kind of dithers. At other times, he’s doing his best but hamstrung by idiots or unable to corral people pulling things in different directions for their own self-serving purposes. On the occasions when he does get a win, it’s often by the skin of his teeth. But on W1A, he’s gradually emerging as both a savvy and considerate leader. While this is partly just in comparison to some of the useless execs he’s surrounded by, it’s not only that.

Anna has been officially named Director of Better, head of the new BBC Better initiative. Pretty much everyone—Anna included—still doesn’t know what that actually means. But Siobhan is going full steam ahead on a lavish launch party anyway. Meanwhile, thanks to Will’s habit of attracting technical glitches, Ian gets a sneak peek at Simon’s planned restructuring of the BBC’s executives.

At this point, everyone is sort of playing chicken with the whole BBC Better thing, or maybe it’s an Emperor’s New Clothes situation. Nobody knows what it is, but nobody wants to admit they don’t know, so they all just kind of pretend to know what they’re talking about. This is trickiest for Anna, who’s supposed to be giving a speech at the launch. Since she’s vaguely aware that Better will have some oversight on the other departments, she resorts to asking other execs to type up “a few thoughts” and send them to her.

Our character of the week is entertainment format producer David Wilkes, played by Rufus Jones. He’s Lucy’s colleague with the trite, half-formed reality show ideas, and a regular dynamic between them is for him to casually compliment her hair/outfit/etc. while she waits to hear what he actually wants from her. She’s been his cleanup batter since the start of the series, taking his mess and making some sense of it, and now he’s failing upward on the strength of the help she’s given him. When it comes to race, Twenty Twelve doesn’t get much more advanced than “these white people don’t know what they’re talking about, but they’re desperate to prove they’re not racist,” but W1A is doing a decent job of quietly showing how Lucy is treated like an underappreciated workhorse at the BBC. She struggles to get her own projects off the ground but is always expected to come in and save other people’s.

Like I said, Ian has been kind of coming into his own on this show. Ever since the series 1 finale, when he figured out the magic formula to make things happen, he’s been doing pretty well for himself. More than once, we’ve seen him finagle his way around the managerial mud pit. Simon has taken to passive-aggressively calling him “Captain Values,” and when Ian gets a look at Simon’s restructuring, he’s able to get the jump on him. Additionally, Ian’s own title as Head of Values is sort of nebulous too, but he does take it seriously. His values are displayed in how he cares about others. Although, like the others, he can get caught up in jockeying for position, those concerns often fall away when someone really needs help. When that happens, he prioritizes just being there for them.

Here are my favorite David Tennant narration lines from this episode:

• Nice euphemism for Will accidentally swapping his schedule with Ian’s on their respective tablets – “In his new official capacity as assistant to the Head of Values, Will is already making a big difference to Ian’s working life.”
• More Syncopatico jokes, whose convenient “you can print from anywhere in the building!” is less convenient when it doesn’t tell you which printer it sent your document to – “Ian is one of the many people in New Broadcasting House who’ve been brought closer together by the BBC’s cutting-edge new Syncopatiprint technology.”
• Classic Twenty Twelve/W1A phrasing – “By 6:00, it’s time for the 6:00 news.”

Joel Fry-days: Love Wedding Repeat (2020, TV-MA)

I went into this one with much trepidation. I always liked Sam Claflin in the Hunger Games franchise (Finnick!), and a certain plot device revealed in the trailer had me clinging to a faint hope that maybe this would be the wedding-movie equivalent to Death at a Funeral, a film I thought was hilarious. But it really didn’t look good. And, well? I’d say the end result is an exercise in wasted potential.

Jack’s number-one job on his sister Hayley’s wedding day is to make sure everything goes perfectly for her, and if he has a chance to make up for lost time with the one who got away, all the better. Unfortunately, a major wildcard has just shown up in the form of Hayley’s coked-up ex, who crashes the reception determined to win her back. Hayley enlists Jack’s help in an incredibly bad idea: neutralizing her ex by spiking his champagne with sleeping drugs. Against his better judgment, Jack reluctantly agrees to the plan, not realizing a group of kids are about to run around switching all the name cards at that table.

The central hook of the movie, hammered home by a wise old unseen narrator, is that love is at the mercy of the whims of chance. The rearranged seating opens up multiple outcomes for this farcical question of who will end up drinking the drugged champagne. Done well, this could’ve gone the route of the iconic Community episode “Remedial Chaos Theory,” giving us a multiple-timelines comedy where part of the fun is seeing how small changes ripple out and affect the unfolding events. Instead, we finish the first outcome around the 50-minute mark, do a quick rewind, speedrun through a montage of other possibilities, then stick with a second main scenario until the end of the film.

So the film doesn’t use its premise all that well, and it doesn’t do much better by its characters. Despite a talented cast, there isn’t much for them to get off the ground in this flimsy, cliche-ridden story. Jack is a wet blanket of a protagonist, and while Sam Claflin does get to show off a bit of entertaining physical comedy, his charm is wasted here. We’re not really shown a compelling reason to root for Jack and Olivia Munn’s Dina to get together. Jack’s devotion to his sister is lovely, but Hayley has been a major contributor to her own prospective downfall here. Although I like Freida Pinto, she’s given hardly anything to do as Jack’s chilly ex Amanda. As friend/guest Rebecca, Aisling Bea, who appeared in the Doctor Who New Year’s special “Eve of the Daleks,” is saddled with a lot of belabored humor early on, but in the second half, things turned around for her somewhat.

Side note: part of the conceit here is that the groom is Italian and the wedding is in Rome, so there’s only one “English table” at the reception, which is how we end up with awkward arrangements like Jack sitting next to his ex. But regardless, this whole friend group dynamic is very confusing. It’s unclear how all of these people fit together and wound up being the sole wedding guests on Hayley’s side.

All right, onto Joel Fry! He plays Bryan, Hayley’s maid of honor (he wants to go by “man of honor,” she won’t let him.) While a lot of the ensemble is given just one or two character aspects to focus on—i.e. Rebecca is annoyingly chatty and obsessed with Bryan, Amanda’s current boyfriend is intensely jealous of Jack—Bryan has a lot going on. He wants to be there for Hayley but is still hung up on the “maid of honor” thing, and he somehow made it until the wedding day without realizing he’s supposed to give a toast at the reception. He’s an actor who’s determined to make a good impression on a famous Italian director who’s also a guest at the wedding (?), and he focuses on that to the point of neglecting his maid-of-honor duties. He’s dreading having to spend the reception with Rebecca “clinging” to him and begs Jack not to leave him alone with her.

That’s maybe too much going on for a supporting character, and not all of it necessarily holds together. In the second half of the film, Bryan describes himself as “a totally self-obsessed, neurotic mess,” which kind of covers it, but beyond all that, he’s also slotted into being whatever the film needs him to be. Early in the film, he proves unreliable as he’s overly focused on this director over Hayley’s actual wedding, but later on, he’s shown to be a pretty supportive friend to Jack. It’s not entirely clear what prompts the round of self-reflection that gets him to the “self-obsessed, neurotic mess” revelation, and he manages to deliver, not one, but two load-bearing romantic speeches at critical points in the movie.

But my god, if Joel Fry doesn’t do his best to sell the hell out of it. While I wouldn’t say he saves the movie or anything, I enjoy watching Bryan the entire time he’s onscreen. Fry’s comedic physicality is used to really good effect, he somehow brings complete sincerity to bullshit lines, and as he juggles Bryan’s selfishness, insecurity, supportiveness, and more, he kind of makes it all feel like it works.

And okay, here’s the thing about actors I like in bad movies. As I’ve said before, every actor has some clunkers in their filmography, that’s just part of the business. Maybe things didn’t pan out creatively, maybe there was meddling that messed with the end result, maybe bills just needed to be paid. Either way, every actor has been in bad movies. Sometimes in these instances, there’s nothing for them to salvage or they can’t rise above the lackluster material. At others, their role is so minor that I just sort of tune out until their scenes come along. And at others, they give it their all and become the best thing about a bad movie. 

I’ve definitely been impressed by the latter situation before—like, Peter Dinklage is genuinely fantastic in Tiptoes, and Tiptoes is such a terrible film. It’s a major testament to their skills when they can pull off something like that, and it’s always neat to see. On a personal level, though, it can be weirdly frustrating too. What I mean is, if I’m watching a bad movie for a particular actor and their performance isn’t very good or there’s not enough of them to make it worthwhile, whatever. I write off the time I spent watching that film, check it off my list, and maybe grumble at them being wasted in it. And that’s all—I’m done with that movie and won’t ever give it much thought again. But when an actor I like is good in a bad film, as much as it impresses me, there’s this weird little part of my brain that goes, “Aw dammit, are you really making me like this stupid movie? Am I gonna have to watch this again because I like you so much in it?”

That’s kind of what’s going on here. I know this isn’t a good movie, but when Fry is onscreen, he kind of makes me like it anyway. If the script weren’t so lazy and unfocused, this could’ve been great.

Second side note: again, there’s no real explanation for his shift in perspective, but I do like seeing Bryan come through for Jack as a friend in the later part of the movie. Bryan winds up doing quite a bit for Jack, even if he has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the worst of it. However, as much as I honestly enjoy that aspect of the film, I wish we could’ve seen a little more of Bryan’s friendship with Hayley. We basically get two brief snippets where we see the level of affection he has for her, but for much of the film, he feels more like Jack’s friend than hers. A trio-type situation where he’s best friends with both of them would be fine, I just want to be able to see it—while I like that Bryan is Hayley’s maid of honor, I wanted to get more of their friendship to know why he’s her maid of honor.

Accent Watch

Southern British English.

Recommend?

In General – Nah, too much wasted potential.

Joel Fry – Dammit, I might! I think it’s worth watching once, at least to see him.

Warnings

Thematic elements (including a comedy of errors about accidental drugging,) language, sexual references, drinking/drug use, and brief comedic violence.