Of men and sheep: Rams

The Icelandic film Rams turned out to be disappointing, though there were some beautiful and mysterious shots of the landscape, which brought back memories of a visit to the country, and a true sense of the isolation and difficult life in a small northern Iceland community largely dependent on raising sheep. The sheep in one of the farms are diagnosed with Scrapie, something like mad cow disease I think, necessitating the destruction of all the sheep in the valley. The story concerns an elderly, rugged sheep farmer who illegally tries to keep his flock alive, secretly; the drama is the lifelong tension between this farmer and his somewhat deranged and very angry brother - the two live adjacent and have not spoken for something like 40 years. Over the course of the movie, they bond, at least to a degree, when faced with extreme hardship and danger. The brothers are so strange and taciturn that it's hard to engage with them or with the contentious behavior and the dramatic conclusion, herding a small flock of rams and ewes in an Icelandic blizzard, doesn't carry much tension because we don't care much, at that point in the film, about the outcome. My favorite character was the Australian sheepdog that carries messages back and forth between the bros. (who have the interesting names of Gummi and Kiddi, as if they're the lost Marx brothers).