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
This film sounds like an Oirish rap version of “From Sir with Love”. If the hero is from Jamaica he’s probably Irish anyway. Cromwell transported a lot of Irish out there in the 17th century. They all intermarried with the other slaves.
An Irish country village in 2006 not concerned with “divelopment’ & touting itself as a dormitory estate? Hard to believe. As far as I remember fields down that neck of the woods were going for a million or so each in 2006.
I see from the news this week that the bad landlords are returning. The way things are going with Anglo, we’ll all probably be living in post-Famine conditions in a few years,
There are so many things I could say about the title of the film but I’m not going to. You’ll be pleased to know though that your suggestion of ‘A Daithi for All Seasons’ is still the frontrunner for my new blog title. On reading your review I did think of ‘Irish Ham’ as an alternative though.
I hope there’s another famine, it would be exciting! Isn’t it time we went back to a simpler way of life?
A simpler, better life? I thought we’d tried all that already with the Green Party. All it did was increase the price of petrol.
A famine sounds good in theory (most Irish people could, ahem, stand to lose a stone or four), but in practice it’s always the horrible people who survive famines – they are better at screwing everyone else over to get enough food for themselves. I think part of the reason we’re all so venal is because of the natural selection that took place during the last famine.
Personally, I think the stocks would be a better solution. There’s a lot of people that I’d like to throw rubbish at, starting with President-to-Be Mr Ahern.
Or maybe the dunking stool. Probably in breach of EU regulations though.
p.s. I haven’t seen a priest in a cap like that since I watched the documentary about Marlon Brando’s greatest film never, Divine Rapture.
Jem dobre! My name a Borat. I want to tell you that Irish Jam is number 1 motion pictures in Kazakhstan. Is nice! I see it 12 times at my cousin Billos house. First time I watch the Irish Jam, I watch with my sister. She enjoy it very much. Then I rape her. High five!
Ah jesus, man, there’s such a thing as too much information.
Also, its not the fornication, its the complication.
any attempts to mount stereotypes this broad in actual Ireland would lead to knee-cappings and punishment-beatings”
Hahahahahahahahaha. This sentence deserves a prize