SnoopyStyle In Montana, ranchers are caring for their sheep. They get sheared. They get fed. There are births. After the winter, the ranchers take the herd through the summer pasteurs on public lands in the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains. It is 2003 and it is the last band of sheep.This is a little zen. It brings the audience into the sheep ranch. It takes us into the herd. I don't even want to have the ranchers talk. The main drawback is that it is not necessarily a 100 minutes worth of attention. I got antsy by the midway point. It would be a better hour-long TV show. The scenery is epic. It has beautiful vast vistas and also the gritty small pictures.

Hellmant 'SWEETGRASS': Two and a Half Stars (Out of Five) Another of the more critically acclaimed documentaries from last year, this one tells the story of modern day cowboys herding sheep one last time through the Absaroka Beartooth mountain range in Montana in the summer of 2003. It's directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor (although uncredited), a Harvard anthropologist, and llisa Barbash (his wife) and produced by Barbash. The film has no music or narration and appears to be somewhat randomly edited together with no real story or message to deliver. It's extremely slow paced and lacking any kind of focus.The film follows a family of sheepherders as they make their final summer herd through the mountains of Sweet Grass County. It was filmed in 2001 to 2003 at a time when this was still a way of life for some. There's very little dialogue and what there is contains a lot of vulgar language. The film is not rated but would be rated R due to the extreme amount of F words used throughout. We see the herders at their grimmest and most unlikeable as they toss the sheep around and constantly curse them out.The film is, as I mentioned, very slow and quite dull for almost it's entirety. The scenery is beautiful though and the video is somewhat intimate. It often feels like the herders don't even know they're being filmed as they go about their daily business. It's definitely not a film for everyone and will only please a select audience but if you're into honest documentaries with no other BS you'll probably enjoy it.Watch our review show 'MOVIE TALK' at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=003J1CrnYDk

bmacstudio and call it beautiful, then I can see enjoying this film. Yes, it is well done....The camera work is really wonderful. What I'm not seeing is how this is anything but what it should be, an anti wool clothing piece. Good god, they abuse the sheep with shears and send them stripped into the snowy winter. Not a single scene where these guys treat any of these animals with respect.Sorry, I'm actually watching it right now, and I understand there is ignorance at play, but these are horrible human beings.Enjoy the "Magnificent... Wonderful... Astonishingly beautiful..." "Nature overwhelms the screen and even minds."Really?

[email protected] I saw "Sweet Grass" with four other people, one of whom enjoyed the Montana scenery, one of whom belonged to a family that had raised sheep and thought the film misrepresented reality and three of whom, counting me, were bored out of their skulls. The dialog -- "Baa" is the dominant word at the start, a multiplicity of curses that would shame a sailor hold sway toward the end, and repetitive out of tune singing is interspersed along with a lot of yips and yells intended to startle the sheep into movement -- is of negative interest. Among the misrepresentations according to the sheep-in-the-family viewer: Mother sheep don't generally recognize their own offspring, certainly not by scent; shearing generally occurs in the summer, not in the dead of winter. (Though I promised my son-in-law 20 sheep as a dowry, which my wife would never allow me to deliver, I can't vouch for any of this. However, there was no slaughtering of sheep for meat, which none of us found credible considering the size of the operation.) However, I can personally attest that this film produces less poetry than the phone book. If you are interested in watching thousands of sheep behave like thousands of sheep and herders struggle with getting them to and from summer pasture, be my guest. But consider yourself forewarned.