Irish Wish (2024) - well, it’s been a while but what better time to watch a new irish-themed one of these than st patrick’s weekend. i’m doing MY part. plus lindsay lohan has actually had a pretty good run of these. she was in a really crazed one i watched at my parents called “falling for christmas”, in which she’s a millionaire ski lodge heiress who falls off a cliff and gets AMNESIA and must be nursed back to health by a humble, blue collar, uh, ski lodge proprietor. and of course she was in the mcfly vehicle Just My Luck. so a strong track record of movies where she either gets a head injury or is cursed by a mysterious supernatural entity and i’m happy to say this one is the latter kind of thing.
firstly… i know nobody cares but i have to say the film’s most jarring quality to me: it was filmed in ireland but parts of it are meant to represent america, so there are early scenes taking place in “brooklyn” where people are getting in and out of yellow cabs intercut with stock footage of nyc - but also all the secondary characters have unremarked-upon irish accents, and the glamorous new york launch happens across the street from dublin’s premier communist bookstore
lindsay lohan’s mom also has an accent but is meant to represent a schoolteacher in des moines and whenever she appeared the thought of them like carefully constructing an american-style highschool set somewhere in dublin gave me a mild feeling of vertigo. anyway most of the movie after that takes place in more familiar countryside settings. the plot involves a roguish bestselling irish novellist (sample quoted line: “…and he disappeared into the mossy glen”) and his editor, lindsay lohan, who apparently also cowrote the book but was pressured to leave her own name off it. despite this she loves him enough to follow him to County Mayo, where she spends a few days glumly third-wheeling it up around his family’s ancestral castle(?). there’s a good bit where she heads out to a dock with her friends only to find there aren’t any romantic little pink rowboats left for her to use. oh, you guys go ahead. pay me no mind - i’ll be mournfully standing on the dock watching you all. is this what that otis redding song was about.
all the author’s family dress like members of Vampire Weekend but this really is how posh irish guys tend to dress so i’ll allow it. note the goofy little bloomsday hat… anyway soon after this the movie takes an unexpected supernatural twist as after dramatically exclaiming “i wish I was marrying Male Lead” suddenly a mysterious twinkling irish lady appears to her from behind a rock to say “is that a wish you were makin’”, make strange gestures and summon a burst of magic wind that isekais lindsay lohan into a new reality. it later turns out that this is actually St Brigid although she seems more like some kind of non-sectarian prankster bog fairy than a christian saint. throughout the movie she will be magically appearing in mirrors, airplane boarding screens and stained glass windows to do a sassy wink and indicate the presence of deviltry.
anyway once again its an irish romance movie the actual romantic lead turns out to be an english guy who was in fuckin Downton Abbey of all things! i believe this is a weird result of romcom dialectics: the fantasy is “ireland” but they don’t want to risk people thinking lindsay lohan is gonna be married off to some dirt eating peasant, so the irish families are always like rich castle owners - but that makes them TOO rich to function as love interests and so the actual romance is deferred to a safety brit. someone should tell the “how the irish became white” guy about this so he can write a sequel. anyway he has a job as a nature photographer which means he gets to deliver the line “i’ve just been offered a job to photograph that lizard!” as part of the big romantic denouement.
other notes:
- starts off with the dictionary definition of a “wish” onscreen before the title comes in in the lord of the rings font
- the lindsay lohan character’s favourite author is james joyce and she gushes that the cliffs of moher are “like something right out of his pages”. is she thinking of the dead guy from “the dead”?
- when st bridget undoes her parallel reality magic we get a quick best of all the scenes where lindsay lohan falls over something played in reverse
- i wish more of it too place in neo-dublin since the nyc greenscreens were kind of endearingly weird. also glad that dublin has grown enough to be a proxy for new york instead of its traditional role on film, “acting as standin for 19th century london in Fu Manchu movies”
- ten minutes into this one my wife said “this is going to be your Erasure” and i think she was right
