Defector Watches A Christmas Movie: ‘’Tis The Season To Be Irish’

This is the time of year when the best, biggest, and most ambitious movies come out. Not Oscar season, but rather that stretch when the halls of streaming services are decked with the brightly lit, thinly disguised advertisements that are the year’s new Christmas movies. There are more than 100 new Christmas films to watch this holiday season, and whether that number horrifies or excites you depends upon how much of a freak you are for the festive. Sabrina is proud to say they are a real Christmas freak, and this year they asked some of their colleagues to watch some of the most, uh, available new holiday movies. The third movie in our lineup is ‘Tis the Season to Be Irish, a Hallmark movie that dares to ask, “What’s the Gaelic word for house-flipping?” This week, we are joined by an extra special guest: Leigh McKenna.

Leigh McKenna: This is Leigh. I’m on here.

Dave McKenna: WOW. We’re together! Sabrina, this is my wife, Leigh.

Sabrina Imbler: Leigh, it’s nice to meet you! And it’s an honor to gather with both of you on such a festive occasion. We are here to discuss a Hallmark Christmas movie that came out on Nov. 10 to relatively little critical fanfare or audience attention, a movie that would have sunk into the crowded depths of forgotten Hallmark movies if it wasn’t for eagle-eyed Barry, who spotted it on my list of new Christmas movies and suggested I watch it with none other than Dave McKenna. Dave and Leigh, thank you for indulging us. I was curious—are either of you Christmas movie buffs? And have either of you seen a movie before that intermingles the themes of Christmas and Ireland?

DM: I am not at all a movie buff. I’ve watched three movies in the last two years. I have never seen a movie this reminded me of. And I’m a grinch and a bah humbugger, but I get more Irish by the day, so I wanted to see how Hallmark would make the Irish look. The scenery was really great, but I coulda shot nice scenery! Since I’m a cinema neanderfuck, I was determined to type: “Ireland is a character in this movie!”

LM: I love Christmas movies, and I love movies generally. I can usually find redeeming value in most movies. The older I get, the less patience I have for craptastic movies though, I’m realizing. I’m a huge fan of the movie Leap Year with Amy Adams and Matthew Goode and this Hallmark movie had shades of it, but without the charm and good writing. Leap Year was supposed to be about Feb. 29, but there were some Christmas-like scenes, I think. This Irish disaster was really dang bad. I spent the whole movie feeling embarrassed for the actors. This is the kind of movie that makes me think “Yeah, I COULD write a screenplay.” And all I kept imagining was when they would yell “cut” and how sheepish and embarrassed they must all be.

DM: Yeah, this movie was ass. Should I have added SPOILER?

SI: Leigh, I’m so glad you brought up Leap Year, because some people on the internet were comparing ‘Tis the Season to Be Irish to Leap Year, which I haven’t seen in years. Are the common themes just romance in Ireland? Does Leap Year also star a sheep named Lambchop? But you both hit on the key takeaway of this particular movie, which Dave actually shared with me earlier this week, so I’m glad to hear that that immediate review has stood the test of time.

LM: The comparison with Leap Year is a stretch for sure. The common theme was headstrong, can-do American gal goes to Ireland, and the scenery I guess. Leap Year was actually coherent, and clever, and seemed reasonably accurate. But I definitely think they were going for that vibe with the Hallmark trash. So much was laughable from the same three ladies ALWAYS running into one another, how everyone is ALWAYS at the Christmas fair, how the leading man didn’t seem to have a JOB because he was just always popping up. Whoever dealt with costuming definitely loves throwing in a “pop of color” into every scene. Hot pink abounded.

I loved how she took one suitcase to Ireland and had a bunch of costume changes. You’ll notice when the guy takes her suitcase out of the car at the beginning, it’s so obviously empty. Several things in the movie (candle, mistletoe, etc.) insinuated some sort of magic or meaning in so many ways but they never panned out. Dave was convinced that Lambchop was going to be Rose’s mom reincarnated. 

DM: When we were watching, Leigh said, “Of course, part of the fun of a Hallmark movie is predicting what’s going to happen!” And right off she predicted that the annoying lady who lost her husband is going to end up with the town carpenter, who like all the main characters seems to spend his life following the other main characters around this one-block town: “Dunclare.” We got lots of laughs about “Dunclare.” Also, I asked Leigh at the start if the two main characters are going to end up together. SPOILER: This movie is ass. Of course they do!

SI: The annoying lady in the movie is a house flipper named Rose, who does not live in Ireland but decides to spontaneously flip a cottage in Ireland, which she pays more than €5,000 above asking price to scoop it from would-be buyers, despite the region’s stated surplus of flip-ready Irish cottages. Rose can flip a cottage from anywhere in the world because she, we will later learn, does not have a home, raising some questions (such as, where does she store her stuff?) that will obviously go utterly unanswered in the movie. Once Rose flies to Ireland with her single suitcase, she meets Sean, the Irish man who, it turns out, sold her the cottage and is also the historical consultant for its renovation: the final boss of the flipping monopoly. I have put in a lot of hours watching Chip and Joanna Gaines renovate fixer-uppers, and I wanted to ask if either of you have opinions on the practice of flipping houses? Occasionally the movie made it seem like they should be a protected class.

LM: I’ve been looking at Irish properties for years now, dreaming, and there is NO WAY her cottage literally a stone’s throw from the scene would have sold for €15,000 or €20,000. Would definitely be at LEAST €200,000. I THINK when the creepy would-be beau told her about the history of the house, I THINK he said the previous owner’s name was Rose. I didn’t care enough to rewind to confirm. But I thought, “The previous owner’s name was Rose and they didn’t remark on that coincidence?” I also loved how Rose dismissed everything about the Ireland flip plan by basically saying, “I’ve done this a million times. I’m used to working with preservationists, etc.” without acknowledging that she’s in ANOTHER COUNTRY. Just portraying us again as an Ugly American. Thanks, Rose.

DM: Yeah, since this country went to hell, we send each other ads for Irish apartments and cottages. My buddy Mark, who used to be in a band with me last year, just sold his D.C. house and bought a massive place in Ireland so that got us dreaming, even though I’ve only had four addresses my whole life and they’re all inside the D.C. Beltway. So I ain’t really gonna move, but if I left here it’d more likely be Ireland than the suburbs. I have always thought of flipping houses as something for other people, so I haven’t got a hardcore opinion on it, though now that I think about it when me and Leigh first were together, D.C. was the murder capital and nobody wanted to live here. The city had a lottery for houses for $1 and we came in second place for a big-ass Victorian-looking row house in Columbia Heights, so we woulda been flippers if we’d’ve won and that place has to be worth $1.5 million now.

I knew the movie would be ass after one of the opening scenes where there’s a split screen during a phone conversation, and it’s light out both at the end of the day in the U.S. and over in Ireland. I feel like an ass being so nitpicky, but the movie never recovered!

SI: Leigh, that’s a great point. Rose’s bumbling American-ness made this movie occasionally veer into Emily in Paris territory, except it’s Rose in Ireland.

LM: Except the actress who plays Rose is too old to pull off that Emily in Paris stuff. I told Dave, “I wonder if other countries like Ireland make American version of movies, like the ranchhand Christmas adventure in Texas or whatever.” The guy they picked for the lead was uber creepy. I said he was the Normas Bates of “Dunclare” (dumbest made-up Irish village name ever). Dave clearly and quickly re-nicknamed him “Norman O’Bates.” He was such a creeper. There was ZERO chemistry between the actors. 

SI: Something that I think we’re all hitting on here is that the two leads in this movie, Rose the house-flipper and Norman O’Bates the Irish man, are both extremely annoying and unlikable. They bicker throughout the movie about Rose’s renovation plans—the extent of which seem to feature tiles with “cute Celtic designs” and a “really cute” chandelier. Norman’s strict adherence to historical preservation, and the goings-on of local celebrity sheep Lambchop. I was curious: When these two characters would fight, whose side were you on?

LM: Lambchop. I was on Lampchop’s side for every argument.

DM: The best parts of watching the movie was seeing Leigh get so creeped out by the poor man’s Hugh Grant. She’d go “UGGH!” or some other groan every time that mofo would pop up in the town square. One of the umpteen times he pops up in the square stalking Rose, Leigh shrieked, “Do you do anything with your life dude! He does nothing but wander around the town!” I was dyin’. Rose was so milquetoast.

Another thing that bugged me: O’Bates kept saying, “Always read the fine print!” After the third or fourth one, I would not have minded him getting taken out by a car bomb. (Too soon?) But seriously, pretty early on, Rose shoulda told that guy to “say nothing!” (Too soon?) Not enough space on the internet to go over The Troubles with this movie! (Yeah, too soon!)

LM: We should definitely talk about all the jump cuts. The people who produced this film just didn’t give a rip. There were at least five bad jump cuts. My favorite was the one RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THEIR FIRST KISS at the end of the movie.

DM: The access-channel production values for this piece of shit also brought us a barrel O’ Laffs. The shitty cuts came at all the big scenes! The widow lady also pissed me off. Every time she’d whine about her dead husband, Danny, I was thinking, “Danny’s in a better place now! Away from your whiny ass!”

SI: Although Rose is warned the renovations will take 18 months, she manages to finish the inn on an ambiguously short pre-Christmas timeline.

LM: I kept looking for clues of the timing, and I can’t remember, but at one point I think we were told she did all the renovations in three weeks. I’ve been to Ireland. It takes a long time and specialized knowledge to repair traditional thatched roofs! Following the timeline was so bizarro. She renovated the trashed house in a matter of two or three weeks? Seriously? Where were all the workers? The obligatory “make-over” scene where she dons her overalls and cleans out her condemned property is laughable.

DM: Yeah what the hell was with that timeline? She did all that work on the house, which had to take a few months, yet the streets of DUNCLARE were already tarted up for Xmas, and I know the Irish don’t do that shit in September. This movie is ass!

SI: While Rose stayed at the inn as an invisible army of indentured Irish fairies carried out her cottage renovations, at least she made some friends. She befriends a melancholic widow and a younger woman who soon reveals herself as a pop star in hiding. (She claims it’s because she needed to escape the fame, but literally no one was thinking about her … she definitely was missing that spotlight!) Were these friends more or less annoying than Rose?

LM: By the end of the movie, I wanted to snatch the urn out of the widow’s hands and toss it off the Cliffs of Mohr myself. (For a much better ash-scattering scene, watch The White Lotus.) The incognito pop star was also ridiculous. We’re supposed to believe she’s super famous, but because she got a haircut no one knows who she is? She’s like 24 years old, tops, and when she confessed to her two newfound friends (who she implicitly trusts and doesn’t suspect might be undercover paparazzi), the pop star says, “And I’ve always wanted to refurbish a house.” Always? Girl, you’re in your early 20s!

DM: I gotta say, I kinda fell for the zzzz pop star character when she launched into “Danny Boy” to get the whiny widower to finally toss lucky dead Danny’s ashes. I always thought the song was zzzzz until I saw Sinéad O’Connor sing it on Irish TV, and man, I still go back to it now and then. That scene with the pop star, dumbass as it was, got me sorta choked up thinking about Sinéad and I just wanted to go watch Sinéad sing.

LM: All the forced “inside jokes” to supposedly bring the couple together … ugh. Like the plum pudding, and “for me ma,” and … there were others, but they were so unmemorable I’m drawing a blank. When the pop star comes into the pub for the first time and the widow had told Rose something to the effect of “Here comes Katie, she sort of keeps to herself,” or something … then in walks Katie and she was deathly quiet to the point that I thought, “Oh, she’s deaf.”

SI: Speaking of plum pudding, I was curious how accurate both of you found the film’s portrayal of Ireland and Irish culture. I found all the completely unrelated (and occasionally repeated) drone shots of landscapes and sheep to be rather beautiful. But the movie’s grasp of Irish culture seems to consist of: fairies, people being named Rose, saying “knackered,” and plum pudding.

LM: It certainly didn’t seem like winter in Ireland. Way too many sunny days, and they basically wore light jackets with jaunty scarves wrapped around their necks. I can’t claim to be all that familiar with Irish culture, but it seemed like a crappy movie that is supposed to double as a tourism ad. I should have looked at the credits. Does Hallmark do stuff like partner with the country where the movie is filmed to advertise the country as a “product?” I would bet the Irish tourism board contributes a few dollars. But why didn’t Rose rent a car? I wondered that a few times. I’m guessing DUI …

SI: Dunclare is a walkable city, at least for Lambchop!

LM: Dunclare … what a name. Gaelic for “can’t be bothered.”

DM: The culture thought that came to me was, “No mention of hurling or gaelic football?” C’mon! Was this written by a Brit?

We gotta mention that scene where Rose and Norman O’Bates were swirling mincemeat in his mom’s kitchen together in a big bowl, the most sexless remake of Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze I’d ever seen. Leigh gasped one of her many “OH MY GODs” at that one. I was howling.

LM: Yeah, the stirring of the mincemeat was very cringe, as the kids say.

I thought it was weird that we had to know (I think they told us three times) that Rose was originally from Maine. Were were supposed to think, “Oh, OK. Topography and weather-wise, kinda similar, so maybe Rose can hack it in Ireland.” And Norman O’Bates trying to get everyone drunk with the 12 drinks of Christmas was strange. Didn’t matter though, because when they finally left the pub, they seemed totally fine and walked all the way back to the cottage by the sea.

DM: Yeah, plying the ladies with that much booze shoulda led to something ugly or at least not boring. But instead after that alleged all-night binge, O’Bates and Rose go on a marathon walk to the fixer-upper cottage and work all day with no sleep? As the Irish would say: “Come the fuck on!”

LM: Even if Rose was going to bail on Ireland, didn’t she learn anything about how ill-prepared she was? Nope! I’m going to Scotland now. Her cottage didn’t have electricity, heat or water and I did wonder where she’s going to the bathroom.

SI: Rose eventually does manage to hack it, somewhat, in Ireland. Once she finishes renovating the cottage into a home that is indistinguishable from a prefab in Waco, Texas, she decides she needs to sell it. After all, there’s nothing keeping her in Ireland, except for her clingy beau, who she appears to hate. (Rose’s realest relationship in the movie is with Lambchop the sheep.) When a buyer finally makes a bid, Rose meets with them only to find … they’re also house-flippers! Only these flippers are the bad kind of flippers. They explicitly say they plan to gut it and transform it into a luxury property. This gives Rose pause, because she’s the good kind of house-flipper; we learn that her backstory is that she had a vaguely hard time growing up and started flipping houses when she was 20 as a way of escaping the terrors of her small-town life—who amongst us hasn’t considered such a thing!

This offer comes in right before Rose and Norman O’Bates are about to dive into the ocean in the Dunclare tradition of the cold plunge, leading Rose to back out of the plunge. But eventually Rose decides to stay in Ireland with her man and her cottage, and the two share a first kiss—imagine moving to an entirely new country and cottage for some guy you’ve never even kissed yet!—and then they finally do the plunge. But, crucially, they only remove their outer layers, keeping on their jeans and sweaters and revealing no extra inch of flesh beyond what one might expect to see from a mummy. I know Hallmark Christmas movies exist in a universe where it is illegal to kiss more than once or even entertain the notion of sex, but the fully-clothed cold plunge was appalling.

LM: I felt like the Polar Bear plunge was a nod to Bad Sisters. But going in in their clothes? They didn’t strip down to their skivvies? 

DM: I do cold plunge every March in North Carolina when I go away with my high school buddies to watch March Madness basketball. It’s thrilling, and every time I think I might die. But why are you making me think happy thoughts, Sabrina? Focus! This movie is ass! If you jump in the water over there, it’s a cold plunge no matter the time of year. Even in August, the kids wear wetsuits on the beach! The Irish are a pale people for a reason! 

LM: I told Dave that Sean reminded me of the lead singer from that band that sings “Come On Eileen.” Angular. Now that I’ve watched it, I stand by it, but think I was actually thinking of the guy who sang “Safety Dance.” Sean is those two guys put together. This guy has several siblings who are grown and succeeding. So Sean is the son who never launched. What a catch.

DM: Leigh also said at one point: “I can’t help but wonder if between takes, do the actors say to each other, ‘Oh my God, this is such crap!'” I guessed for sure they do.

LM: I told Dave that I haven’t felt this cringy watching something since my dad was alive and a tampon commercial came on!

SI: As Rose’s mom allegedly told her, Ireland is where wishes come true. Did this movie make you feel more or less excited about the prospect of moving to a cottage in Ireland?

LM: I’d happily move to Ireland, so long as it’s not Dunclare overrun with Americans and unlaunched sons!

DM: I gotta disclose here that I actually just had a conference with an immigration lawyer last week about finally getting my Irish citizenship. The cost is a lot closer to what Rose paid for that beachside cottage than I’d like, but I’ve been thinking about doing it for decades so it’s about time to take the plunge, like Rose and O’Bates do at the end of that piece of crap. I won’t hold this movie against the people of Ireland.