Arrest These People For Crimes Against Irishness

Where to begin with this disgusting trailer for Red Roses and Petrol. When a film looks this sickening it's hard to know where to start. Maybe we're wrong and it's actually a good movie but the fact that it was made in 2003 and is getting released in 2008 doesn't give us much hope.

Let's just get out the check list of the crimes against cinematic Irishness and see how many are here.
1) Based on a play. check
2) A dead patriarch. check
3) A wake. check
4) Dark family secrets. check
5) Whiskey. check.
6) Irish dancing (or something loosely resembling it). check
7) Diddly-eye music (with a token attempt to make it feel contemporary by roping in Pogues rip-offs Flogging Molly). check
8) American director ramping up the Oirishness. check.
9) Next to no Irish actors (Susan Lynch, get out of there, you're enabling these criminals) check.
10) Accents that are meant to be Irish but sound almost Jamaican (check out Z-list British celebrity Max Beasley's woeful insult of an accent for a sample). check
11) Token shot of the Ha'penny bridge to make it seem like it wasn't shot in a studio in America - which also unfortunately highlights the fact that it is apparently set in the present day even though everybody looks like they are living in some lost year of the 50's. check.
12) The collective vomiting of the Irish nation. check

What's most confusing about these movies is that they never make money. The Irish American audience don't lap them up like the African American audience does with Tyler Perry and Martin Lawrence movies (which they're welcome to, by the way). Granted there have been successes like The Brothers McMullen but they focused specifically on the Irish American milieu and weren't selling the old country back to the savvy modern Irish diaspora.

Red Roses and Petrol eh? Maybe we could set fire to it quite easily then.