All Is Lost
Rating: 15%
Rotten Tomatoes: 93%

Watching All Is Lost is equivalent to listening to the painful laboring of an elderly patron debating whether to leave a 6.5% or 7% tip after promptly finishing “brunch” by 8:30 a.m. at a local pancake house.  Decaf coffee, a bowl of bran flakes with skim milk, several crosswords and one and a half hour later they decide to leave 6% because the waiter seemed like he was madder than a wet hen around the 7th coffee refill. The tip is left in 2 dollar bills with a Werther’s on top.

All Is Lost embodies this prodigious boredom. Watching Robert Redford aimlessly linger around his ship that is lost at sea with absolutely no urgency or purpose is a chore in the truest sense of the word. He may as well have been wading in a lukewarm jacuzzi, enjoying a matinee magic show on a retiree-only cruise ship…touring different stamp collection museums around Florida. At one point a storm rolls in, the prospect of something exciting happening is paralyzing. It stirs you from your half asleep stupor. Then…as with the rest of the movie the momentum is quietly neutralized. Instead of hauling ass around the boat, batting down the hatches, Redford instead sips a glass of whiskey like his morning prune juice and delicately shaves  what appear to be ultra soft and very well maintained grandpa whiskers. He moves with the urgency of a three toed sloth who just ate a handful of Xanaxes and has been given access to an overstuffed couch.

I bet the jeans he was wearing in the movie were cotton and not denim.  Judging by the way he shuffled his feet across the carpeted vessel, he was clearly wearing orthopedic inserts. Maybe those had something to do with the pacing of it all. I struggled about halfway through the movie before succumbing to the crippling boredom. Wiping the cob webs that had somehow gathered on the remote and changing the channel to Frasier re-runs. The idea that this was somehow Oscar nominated is more mind-blowing than the existence of the Flatizza.