If you’ve come here expecting a piece about fruit preserves then may I kindly ask you to fuck off, for what we’re talking about here is a film called Irish Jam. Starring Eddie Griffin, the guy from Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo, and Anna Friel, the actress that loves to do rubbish Irish accents. Eddie Griffin plays a -- actually at this point I’m just going to paste the information in from Wikipedia.

Irish Jam is a 2006 comedy film starring Eddie Griffin. The plot centered around an African American who wins an Irish public house in a raffle, and has to save the village from the clutches of an evil landlord. Despite the bulk of the film being set in Ireland it was not filmed there, nor were the actors Irish, but English.

The film was poorly received in the UK. In its review of the DVD release, Empire called it a “worst possible Eddie Murphy knock-off” and questioned why they still had an evil aristocratic English landlord in 2006, noting it was filmed in Cornwall because “presumably, any attempts to mount stereotypes this broad in actual Ireland would lead to knee-cappings and punishment-beatings”.

The worst reviews and popularity of all were in fact in Ireland. Many Irish critics and viewers disapproved of the movie because it portrayed the Irish people inaccurately as “old, white, unintelligent, with no fashion sense of any kind”. The film also presented Ireland as unadvanced in technology and architecture. One critic said, “Ireland hasn’t looked like this in a hundred years, which was during the famine.”

I wonder which critic wrote that, because I think our famines were a small bit further back. What is this crap all about?, I don’t hear you say. Well Eddie Griffin’s character wins an Irish poetry contest by plagiarising a rap song, and his reward is a pub in a tiny little village covered in shit. Eddie travels over to claim his new property. The village are all out to meet Eddie, and there’s dancing and leppin’ and drinkin with enjoyment as they wait for him to get off the boat. To be honest, the whole village look like dirty paedophiles. And I mean dirty, as in, covered in a lot of dirt. Whoever wrote this tripe was smoking too much PCP.

Of course, the anticipation quickly turns to horror, once the villagers realise it’s a black man! Uh-oh!

Anyway, all this gritty racial tension is quickly swept under the lounge carpet as the village of stinky deformed people unite with the strange visitor to rescue the village from some evil English landlord. The film is a scarily sinister stereotypefest, in which Oirish are people are painted as retarded chimps that live in their own filth. And there’s a few references to black men’s dicks being huge too. It must be the most disgusting looking film in existence, you can almost smell the shit and fumes through the screen. Most of the actors look like they have third degree burns to the face.

Final rating:

0 Orangutans out of 5

The dirty, faded-grey bleak-mosphere is possibly the first striking element of 2009′s Metropia, the Swedish animated film directed by Tarik Saleh. It’s set in 2024 and follows the conspiracy-sniffing adventures of Roger (voiced by Vinnie Gallo), an unremarkable office drone from Stockholm. Metropia employs a special animation process, involving real photo models, Adobe lightning bolts and presumably four hundred billion man-hours. The result is altogether creepy.

The plot mainly revolves around the methods of mind control employed by a sinister company, the suitably evil-sounding Trexx Corp, helmed by Ivan Bahn (Udo Kier). The Earth’s resources are thin on the ground, so everyone has to either cycle or ride Trexx Corp’s Metro, a heaving subway network connecting all of Europe (that would be really handy).

Thanks to the far-out animation style, all the characters have anxious looking swollen heads, and their mouths are slow-moving. Roger looks rather queer from the side:

Hello Kitty is a recurring theme throughout. Everything is washed in grey; the only colours I can remember are the pink of the Hello Kitty dolls, and the red of the mysterious Nina (Juliette Lewis), who in appearance reminds me of Marlene Dietrich.

Roger is surely on anti-depressants: he mopes and trudges around emotionlessly for most of the film. Even his own impending death doesn’t excite or rouse him. All he wants is to regain control over his life, though the damn voice in his head sure isn’t contributing to his wellbeing. Perhaps I am the only one who, while watching Roger communicate with the voice inside his head, began to think that having a voice in your head would be really cool. You would never be lonely. Just as long as that voice is not Pat Spillane, or this guy.

People have complained that the film is a bit slow and the plot somewhat uninspired, but I do think the whole feeling of the film is intentionally one of oppressive boredom/mindless banality. The curious, low-key plod of the film is at strangely mesmerising, but having said that, my overall view of Metropia is that it was slightly underwhelming. The disturbing animation is the thing you’re most likely to remember afterwards. Worth watching though.

You’ll be glad to know that the guy from the Wimax ad makes an appearance too.

Final rating:

3 Orangutans out of 5

This film is abahrt sumthing you facking cunts. IT TAKES A WHILE BEFORE PEOPLE FACKING UNDERSTAND OUR FILMS YOU FACKING CUNTS. IT’S FACKING INTRICATE. WHAT FACKING PAPERS YOU READING, YOU DOZY CUNTS?! YOU SLAGS.

From Leaves of Grass

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

A day in the life of New York City, in miniature.

More Tilt-Shift videos over on Photoble

I watched this on DVD a few years ago, it really was an amusing piece of shit. I found the DVD in some secondhand bookstore in Limerick. It was €2 well spent, I can tell you.

While we’re on the subject of movie endings, have a butchers at this.

Trust a Steven Seagal movie to provide the most ridiculous movie ending of all time.

“He spends most of his time by himself, wandering the forest looking for injured animals. He seems to like it that way.”

I can only guess what he does to those animals when he finds them.

How fucking hilarious.

The man walking through the forest is clearly not Steven Seagal.

Steven Seagal would suck his own cock if he could reach it (maybe he can).

He always is the bad guy, who gets it in the end
He’s out there stuck in horses
Or falling off a train
He never won a gunfight, squabble or a brawl
For being such a loser Hooper’s really got it all

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