Forumrxes
Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.
Salubfoto
It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.
Kien Navarro
Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
Tayyab Torres
Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.
wezel2
Loved this movie. Loved the book and was totally impressed with how they adapted it, nothing was lost.The story is simple: Set in England, sometime around the 1930's - a young woman, Flora Post, is left with a very small annuity after her parents die. She needs to either find a suitable job, or find some suitable relative with whom to live.After she sends out enquiries to a number of relatives and receives responses, she decides to go to her country cousins, the Starkadders.Flora has no qualms about setting off on this adventure, but her cousins have NO idea of what they have let themselves in for.We join her on her adventures and are completely sucked into the story and the surroundings. Nothing defies her, nothing worries her, she sails through the lives and routines, gloom and joy of her cousins and their associates with the greatest of ease and comfort.Flora loves to organize things, and she relentlessly creates order from chaos at Starkadder Farm, in a charming way.There is so much to love about the story itself which is lightheartedly and gently making fund of a certain time in British history.The acting is amazing, the casting is incredible. The pacing of the movie is great - not for one minute does one feel bored or restless. We have seen it 5 or 6 times and it retains its charm.Highly recommended for fans of the out of the ordinary, or British humour.
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.
Tahhh
It's a real pity; it's a hilarious book, the cast is excellent, the sets are terrific, and yet, the film just misses the mark.It was as if none of the screen writers understood the book's humor, really, and there were only a few things about the film that I did enjoy: (1) Mrs. Smiling and the way the film showed how she keeps her collection; (2) Seth and Reuben looked like brothers; (3) I adore Sir Ian in anything he does, and he did a lovely job on Amos, different from Alistair Sim, but just as delightful.I think what was really needed for this film to work was a better screenplay based on the book. I honestly don't think that this movie captured the fun of the book in the way that the earlier BBC version did.I actually found it a bit tedious, rather than fun, and they left out some of the best lines, really, for no good reason. I found that it got rather boring toward the end, and didn't really manage to give a sense of Flora Poste's STRUGGLE to change Cold Comfort Farm--it all changed too easily, and so one didn't really have the nice tension "will she succeed?"--she wins over everybody far too easily, and I think a good deal of the story is probably incomprehensible without knowing the book first.So--my verdict is: find that wonderful old BBC version with Alistair Sim and Rosalie Crutchley and Faye Compton--and treat yourself to the book, which is the sort you pull out again to enjoy afresh, years later, and catch this one if it comes on TV, but don't go out of your way for it.
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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.