Rams

Now here's a quirky one. Rams is a snapshot of life in a remote Icelandic valley, an environment so harsh that seemingly only sheep and stubborn bearded old men can survive there.

The stubborn bearded old men are two brothers, Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson). They live in neighbouring farmhouses but have not talked for forty years. Their only form of communication is the occasional written note which is delivered by border collie.

The film starts with them going head to head in the competition for the most highly-prized ram.

Kiddi wins with Gummi coming second. Kiddi’s celebrations are brief though when it turns out that the winning ram has scrapie. The outcome being that all the sheep in the valley will have to be slaughtered.

Kiddi refuses to comply with the slaughter. So he is arrested, his flock is forcibly destroyed and he goes on multiple drunken benders. Twice we see Gummi reluctantly forced to save his brother when he finds him lying motionless in the snow, drunk and about to freeze to death. On one occasion he scoops him up in his tractor's front loader and deposits him in front of the nearest hospital.

Gummi meanwhile kills his sheep himself against regulations, so that he can secrete a few ewes and his prize ram in his basement. At first he gets away with this but eventually they are discovered by the authorities.

When Kiddi learns what his brother has done, they start to become reconciled. Kiddi helps Gummi re-hide them and then when that doesn’t work, the two of them combine to drive them off into the mountains during a blizzard. A plan which doesn’t go too well due to the inclement weather, this time leaving Kiddi trying to return the lifesaving favour and attempt to save Gummi.

Quirky but excellent. Well worth seeing.

The Big Short

The Big Short is based on real people and true events surrounding the financial crisis of 2007/8. It is based on the book by financial journalist Michael Lewis.

It is about collateralised debt obligations, sub-prime mortgages, credit default swaps, bundling... Warning some of the financial jargon may go well over your head.

Not to worry, the producers have assumed that the audience will be blissfully ignorant of such matters and have enlisted the likes of Margot Robbie (in the bath) and a celebrity chef to help explain things in some of the frequent off the wall moments in the film. 

The film itself focuses on four fringe Wall Street players starting with the eccentric financial analyst Michael Burry (Christian Bale). Burry saw what nobody else wanted to see, that the housing market was based on an increasing number of dodgy loans to people who should never have been considered in the first place. He saw it as inevitable that the market was going to collapse but of course no one believed him.

Burry had complete autonomy of the investment fund he controlled and so he created a commodity for his clients betting against these mortgages. When he went to the banks to explain what he wanted to do they simply laughed at him and willingly sold him all the ‘insurance’ he wanted. 

Word of Burry's madness quickly spread and trader Jarred Bennett (Ryan Gosling) gets in on the act. He sells the idea to a group led by a cynical and depressed banker called Mark Baum (Steve Carell). Baum is the boss of a fund under the umbrella of Morgan Stanley, now he is betting against the hand that feeds him.

Finally, there's Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), a couple of rookies trying to break into the finance industry. They team up with disaffected former banker Brad Rickert (Brad Pitt) to bet against the investments. 

What they all ultimately find is that the investment houses ignore the coming crisis and in fact attempt to hide it because they were all making too much money to want it to stop. The film goes on to suggest that the corruption didn’t stop there and extended to the agencies who oversee the markets and possibly beyond.

The film succeeds in making a story about the financial crisis entertaining and that’s no mean feat. Although it could be viewed as a partner piece to 2011's Margin Call which achieved the same feat and is also well worth seeing.

The Big Short is a smart, clever film with some great acting performances. It could even be the best of this year and is well worthy of its Oscar nominations.

Bone Tomahawk

We’re in the American Wild West where a couple of unsavoury villainous types make the mistake of taking a short cut through a burial ground. As a consequence one is brutally killed whilst the other runs for his life all the way to the town of Bright Hope. This is unfortunate for some of the residents there.

Come the morning several people are missing. One of those is the town doctor Samantha O'Dwyer (Lili Simmons) who had been tending to a man who had been shot in the leg as well as to her husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson) who was recuperating from a broken leg.

An arrow embedded in the wall leads everyone to assume they have been kidnapped by the local tribe of cannibalistic troglodytes (aka cavemen).A task force is dispatched on a rescue mission which consists of the sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell), his backup deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), a chap called John Brooder (Matthew Fox) who seems simply to come along for the chance to shoot somebody and Arthur himself who won’t be left behind.

The first half of the film is the story of this motley bunch traversing the wilderness day and night as they travel to their destination. During this time, we get expanded knowledge about the men but sadly none of them seem particularly interesting and although they get attacked quite often not a lot else really happens.

That is until they get where they are headed and they are clearly unprepared for what is waiting there for them.

Arthur has already been left behind after his injury impeded their progress once they lost their horses (a long story). By the time he eventually gets there by following an improbable trail of rocks and crawling most of it, things are already getting a bit difficult for the others. The savages turn out to be, well, savage. Really savage which we get to see in quite impressive detail.

They have at least found those who had been kidnapped, well, the ones who hadn’t been eaten yet and Samantha is fine. They clearly have shampoo in the caves because our damsel in distress still has her lustrous blonde hair despite being locked in a cage for a week.

This film is certainly an acquired taste (if you excuse the pun) but it does showcase one thing that Hollywood is sorely lacking these days and that’s originality but its perhaps best seen from the behind the sofa.