themadyank-254-181194
Let me preface my remarks by saying that I love Masterpiece Theatre and most British farces. Perhaps this particular effort was lacking in some cohesion that might have held my attention. Although the characters were certainly characters and the incongruities certainly incongruous, nothing about this movie satisfied my curiosity. The cast was terrific and their acting was quite good but the storyline seemed unhinged. If a lot of the book was omitted the movie didn't prompt me to even consider reading it. I was left with the uncomfortable feeling of having watched a bunch of oddities that somehow were never properly connected. And the denouement (a final part of a story or drama in which everything is made clear and no questions or surprises remain) was completely useless in that regard since it left me with more questions than I had before. What a disappointment this dog of a flick was.
Robert J. Maxwell
Kate Bekinsale plays a chic young woman who inherits a pittance and, to save money and perhaps gather material for a novel, moves to remote Cold Comfort Farm. She gets more than she bargained for. First of all, the farm is really a farm, with cows, pigs, horses and barns. Second, it's a sprawling, dilapidated affair, which one character refers to as "the house of Usher." Third, the place is cluttered and filthy and no one cares. Fourth, the half dozen or so residents are just as filthy as the floor and seem to have been inbred for generations. Finally, they are apparently ruled by an old madwoman who sequesters herself in an upstairs room and mutters about having once seen something nasty in the woodshed.Now, these are all very queer characters and each in his own way is a fit case study of psychopathology. Perhaps the most interesting is the preacher, who carries on in the local church, the walls of which are spritzed with lurid graffiti, about how much hell hurts. Did you ever burn your finger? It hurt, didn't it. And what did you do about the burned finger? You put butter on it. Well, friends, THERE IS NO BUTTER IN HELL. Man, there is material enough for a dozen novels.There is a problem with a movie so filled with nuts though. It reminded me of a movie I'd worked in, "Crimes of the Heart," written by Beth Hemsley, about three quirky sisters, any one of whom would have provided a viable narrative. But "Crimes of the Heart," like "Cold Comfort Farm," really has nowhere to much go.In this movie, Kate Bekinsale -- a fantasy of pale and vulnerable beauty -- straightens everything out. People wind up married to those whom they should marry. A half-hour, off-screen chat brings the old crone to her senses and she takes off for Paris. The farm ends up in the hands of the most capable of its workers. Bekinsale literally sails off with the handsome young aviator.Afterwards I felt as if I'd visited a mother who trotted out a handful of lovely children, had them rattle off an idiosyncratic and brilliant version of the Trout Quintet, and then shuffled them outside to play. Gone in a twinkling.It's interesting without being particularly well constructed. Loved the characters, some of them anyway, and almost fell asleep waiting for the happy ending.
cheshire551225800
This is Kate Beckinsale back when she acted instead of did action movies for big bucks. Although I wish they hadn't left out some of the characters and changed some things around from the original book, this movie kept the whacky spirit of Stella Gibbon's novel.For instance, in the novel there were a host of other Starkadders being mistreated by Aunt Ada Doom who Flora helps, Rinnit marries the author Mr. Mybug (Myerburg!) played by Stephen Frye, not Ruben, and the farm isn't actually in bad shape. Ruben has been cooking the books he shows to Aunt Ada so that he can use the money to improve the farm.I have only been able to get my hands on one of the two sequel novels that Stella Gibbons wrote about these same characters, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm and it is not quite as good. But you do get to find out what happened to some of the characters after WWII. Someday I hope to get a copy of Christmas at cold comfort farm to read.Whacky good fun and I like the message that people should follow their own dream (even nutjob religious maniac Cousin Amos, brilliantly played by Sir Ian McKellan) rather than be a slave to a tyrant. It is unrealistic that Aunt Ada can be redeemed so easily but I like the way she was played, as having an epiphany when the American film Czar Mr. Neck asks her if the nasty thing in the woodshed saw her.Excellent movie all around.
[email protected]
If ever a movie with a generally realistic setting called for suspension of disbelief, Cold Comfort Farm is it. The viewer is asked to believe that a well brought up but penniless orphan (Kate Beckinsale) comes to live with relatives who mostly despise her and hate one another and who want desperately to leave this wretched, filthy, gloomy farm but cannot do so because of a tyrannical recluse of a family matriarch who is holed up in her room, consuming enormous quantities of food -- and in the course of an hour and a half, the plucky young orphan has transformed the lives of everyone on the farm, including the matriarch and the gloomy, mad cousin who invited her to come live with them because of a unexplained but terrible wrong done to the young woman's father by this family. Kate Beckinsale is outstanding in the role of the orphaned young woman and Ian McKellen effortlessly steals the picture from everyone but Beckinsale in his role as a fire-and-brimstone preacher whom Kate's character persuades to leave the farm to his eldest son and pursue his mission of preaching his terrifying gospel to the world. The picture has its moments, mostly because of Beckinsale and McKellen, though there is also a wonderful bit involving a Hollywood producer friend of the young orphan's who is persuaded to visit the farm and make a movie star of the lecherous younger brother. Mostly, however,Cold Comfort Farm is thin gruel and not nearly as amusing as the people who made it seem to think it is.
