"Cold Comfort Farm"

This movie stars Kate Beckinsale and Sir Ian McKellen. It's about a young society woman in the 30s whose parents die and leave her orphaned. She doesn't want to work, so she farms herself out to the relatives she has. She decides to go live on Cold Comfort Farm with some very strange relatives to turn the farm around and make them proper ladies and gentlemen. The matriarch of the family is a crazy old lady who barely comes out of her room but leads the farm with an iron fist and no one can ever leave because she "saw something nasty in the woodshed" (she can't even remember what it was she saw).

I thought this was a very sweet movie. It was a BBC production, so I had never heard of it. But the fun came in the characters. You have McKellen who plays the son-in-law of the crazy lady. He runs the farm, but doesn't care much for it because all he wants to do is preach. He's one of those crazy preachers who likes to scare everyone into submission believing that they'll all go to hell. A little intense. Then you have the sons. The quiet Ruben who cares deeply about the farm and turning it around. Seth is the younger brother who really wants to be in the talkies but has no way of doing it (he's played by one of my favorite British character actors: Rufus Sewell of "Knight's Tale" and "Tristan and Isolde"). The mother of the boys is just as crazy as her mother. And the daughter is secretly in love with a rich heir but spouts poetry all day.

Kate Beckinsale basically comes in, talks to these people, cleans them up, and helps them acheive their dreams. That's all she cares about. She wants them to go out and make something of their lives, while being proper. She also has two admirers, one of them a loon and the other a very sweet man who watches her with the cutest looks on his face.

It was great to see what she could do for these people just through small gestures and some talking. The movie was so much fun to watch, and I was sad when it ended. I highly recommend it to everyone. It really talked mostly about how change was a good thing and that sometimes we all just need to break away to make our lives better. Though it was set in the 30s, it transcends all time limitations.