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. [Read more...]