Tales of the Incredible Hoke Robertson

MOVIE REVIEW

All Is Lost

Okay, we all know that Robert Redford is a big-time star who was in some pretty successful movies. We also know that he is one of the communist-bastard Marxist elitists who think that because people pay money to see their films they are somehow above normal intelligence and have figured out that poor people are poor because evil rich people have assets. This is of course the definition of Marxism and is wrong. Really; capital increases with economic activity; the amount of capital is not static. Bill Gates has billions not because everyone else has less but because his product increased the economic activity of billions of people; that, and he was a cut-throat, kill the competition businessman. I have digressed.

Anyway, Ol' Sundance recently made one of those movies that was released in 13 theaters (excuse me theatres), that nobody saw but which was immediately being whispered as an Oscar worthy movie. My wife's father fancies himself as a sailor (because he was a sailboat sailor) and so Naturally (a joke reference to those of you paying attention) wanted to see Redfaced's movie as it was a story about a sailor in trouble. He and the mother-in-law found it on OnDemand, and the wife and I were told we should watch it also.

Let's start out with complete honesty. Robert Redford cannot act. Remember Cate Blanchette? Acting: good, face: bad? Robert Redford: Acting: horrible, face: leprosodic. We will expand on this later.

The movie "All is Lost" is the story of a lone person on a sailboat somewhere in the Indian Ocean (?) who faces danger, trials and tribulations after a cargo container bobs its way into his boat's port hull and puts a hole into it. The first thing you notice in the movie is that Rickety Redford is feeble. There is nothing wrong with being elderly and less able to get around (well, wrong in the sense of "bad." It is of course "wrong” that we all have to get to that point some day). However, someone sailing around the world on his own should be able to stand, walk and climb stairs (ladders to you naval personnel) without giving the appearance of needing to rest or find a safety rail to grab onto. The guy could never take such a trip; he would be exhausted in the first three minutes or have fallen and broken his coccyx (that is not a dirty word). It is very uncomfortable to watch an actor pretending that he is young and able bodied when his motions scream "where is the potty chair?"

As the movie begins, only once do we see the boat's name in a short shot; the good ship "Vladimir Illych." Ironically, it is sailing left across the screen.

I must begin with the Sundance Clod’s appearance. It pains me to sound cruel; kinda. I know that most women dye their hair eventually and that there is no real reason why men can or should not. Those of us who are old school think men dying their hair is kinda wussy, but hey, actors are trying to sell a visual product so no problem. However, when you are a 117 year old "redhead" and your hair color looks like Ginger Spice during the "Girl Power" craze you should reconsider. Yikes; I am color blind and it gave me the chills. It’s like some scary Carrot-Top wig that appears to be made of Kevlar. Don't these people have mirrors? Robert Redford is one of the few remaining actors from the 60's-70's who just can't bring himself to actually get a haircut. He has that poofy-soup bowl cut that tells everyone very clearly that "I used to have long hair and still kinda do because it was cool 40 years ago."

As bad as the hair is, Robert Redfern's face is the real mess. Yikes. He looks like a 90 year old golfer who can't spell SPF. The number of miles of road on that face would get you into the NASCAR hall of fame. It is so splotchy and multi-colored you can hardly see the various textures of wrinkles, festers and flakes. It doesn't look bad, it looks dead and decomposing. I'll bet Keith Richards has a picture on his mirror of Robert Rotfoirn so when he gets up each morning he can say "At least I’m not that bad." It is really yucky.

Anyway, the movie starts with our hearty sailor sleeping in the middle of the day (I guess Wheel of Fortune wasn't on yet) and is rudely interrupted by a loud bump. The damned Chinese (most likely the Taiwanese and not our friends the commie-chinese) have lost a cargo container off one of their ships and it floated gracefully into our hero's boat. Not sure why a steel container once opened will float, but hey, upper level schooling is not pervasive in Hollywood. The container is jammed in a hole in his boat, now leaking water into the cabin, so Bob has to act quickly. In the 42, shaky and excruciating minutes it takes him to climb up the four feet to the deck and back down to the cabin we are assaulted with the sheer panic in decrepit slow motion. Cleverly using a sea anchor (a rope with a bag that catches the water and creates drag), Booby uses the sea itself to pull the two craft apart. It’s not made clear why the sea anchor needs a 7000 foot piece of rope for this purpose or why the hero must sail his boat back to the container to retrieve his sea anchor and all that damned rope. It is in this initial scene that we first learn that 99.9999999999% of the shots MUST have a camera angle from Bob's left side, perhaps to minimize his synthetic lips. Those lips are devoid of feeling due to aeons of Botox injections and only open and close periodically like a near-dead puffer fish lying on the hot sands of the beach.

This unbelievable exertion forces our hero to take a break and he eats beans out of a can; a cinematographic art-form first developed by Buster Keaton in 1924. Here we get a true grasp of the remarkable depth of Robber Readfjord's acting chops. Eating the beans entails numerous pauses for the eyes to dart here and there; dramatic episodes of head tilting at various ocean related noises, and long deliberate chews as if contemplating the mysteries of the universe. Yes, it is that bad. One can only wonder at the hours of prep that went into this moronic scene. If anyone thinks trying to convey meaning during bean eating is effective, necessary or possible they are wrong. Bean eating scenes are as in Blazing Saddles, they are not susceptible to Oscar winning performances. Robert, you are an idiot whose blank, nobody is home stare is to acting as popsicle sticks are to spaceships. To Monty Python fans it’s the palindrome of Notlob; it don't work.

Anyway, we then must endure clever camera angles and endless boring Rudefart actions of mixing epoxy and applying a patch to the hole; endless. The movie is like an infomercial about glue and just as exciting. For some unknown reason, the water which leaked into the boat and onto ALL the electrical equipment, including the radio, damaged that equipment (he didn't bring a satellite phone because they are responsible for polar bears dying). This necessitates another endless scene where we see our healthy and hale hero hoist himself up using a pulley/bosun's chair to excruciatingly haul himself higher and higher to the top of his mast to reattach a small antenna; and of course the 3 days of him lowering himself back down; all shot from the actor’s chiseled left side. In Wreckford's mind this is one of the many "I did my own stunts" scenes which display his "pretty good for my age" condition. In fact, it is an effective scene for euthanasia, if not plucking out one's eyes to end the misery of having to watch him. Anyway, lo and behold, the reattached antenna does not cure the water damaged radio problem; damn it all! If only we had radios produced by happy workers in collectives, gently shepherded to productive bliss by commissars who allocate our fruitful bounty to each according to need from each according to ability. I blame George Bush.

Anyway, while atop the boat, deftly crescent-wrenching the antennae back into place, our hero casts a whimsical look aft and espies a dark and menacing sight. No, it isn't a Tea Party picnic, it is a storm! Well, just as God tested Job (not Steve), Mother Nature tests Weenie Wedford. One would have thought any storm, even those on Jupiter that last hundreds of years would have subsided in the time it takes our hero to don his rain gear. At various points the audience is screaming for him to "forget the damned zippers and buttons and get top side!" To no avail, he labors and labors like the horse in Animal Farm doing his necessary duty. EVENTUALLY, he gets dressed and enters the terrible typhoon! I'm not sure what was supposed to be going on during this scene, but we are forced to endure our hero trying to stand, walk and climb over and over again as he makes sure all the little items he has left lying about are stowed and secured as any real sailor would have done long before he left port. Anyway, the sheer power of the primordial forces exhausts our hearty hero and he creeks back down the ladder and collapses in exhaustion as if shot in the back by some cowardly NRA member. I really don't remember much of this part of the movie as some slight movement of an ear hair kept me distracted. Do ear hairs move during the day like poppies following the sun? Never mind.

At some point Weathered Wereford again braves the elements to staunch the re-flooding previously patched hole and guess what? In a scene repeated in countless other bad movies, a large wave, not unlike that which rackishly forms the hair over his brow, flips the boat upside down! Our hero is flung away into the murky depths but using his "pretty good shape for my age" athleticism (I swear that is not a word) he swims like a Portuguese Man-O-War back to his boat which is miraculously righted by the next mischievous wave. Now our hero is REALLY tired, but is able somehow to spend the necessary 49 minutes it takes to remove his parka before again crashing in well-deserved rest. He awakens, camera on his left side. Well, the storm has subsided but all is seemingly still lost. The boat is leaking too much to be saved so our stalwart scion of fortitude begins the process of abandoning ship. In order that the ignorant masses of moviedom understand what our genius sailor is doing, each item has big BOLD lettering on it to identify what it is. The large bag with oars sticking out is a LIFE RAFT; the long sea anchor and rope is SEA ANCHOR and ROPE; the medical kit is the MEDICAL KIT, the apples in the basket are ORGANIC APPLES and so on and so on until you have memorized the shape and function of every item on the boat. Every item. At this point one starts to think that the script for this epic worked out to about 23 minutes and so they had to add some filler.

Oddly, the only item not clearly identified is the fresh water which he keeps in an old plastic milk container. I could not quite figure out the meaning of this but assume it has something to do with the horrible way in which dairy farmers are poisoning us by using growth hormones; on cows not us. Anyway, we get all the stuff into the life raft (named the Dhzugashvili) and just as we are about to cast away from the sinking boat Duddford remembers he has forgotten something. I forget what he forgot, but with the camera steadily focusing on this left side, he has to get back on board to retrieve something like a picture of his wife, or the anti-aircraft round autographed by Jane Fonda. Oh well, back in the raft we watch as the boat sinks beneath the waves like a GenXer avoiding a job that requires physical activity.

Our clever hero begins a series of vignettes on how life is in a small raft in the middle of the Indian Ocean. We learn that he needs fresh water and that you can use the sun to evaporate sea water and then condense fresh water, and how you can contaminate the fresh water; damn. How a fishing line can be used to fish, but that the myriads of sea life that collect around a raft in the middle of the Indian Ocean also attract hundreds of pesky sharks which eat the one fish you catch with your fishing line. We learn that a small hand pump can keep a rubber raft inflated, though our hands get a bit crampy. We also learn that a lifelong sailor can teach himself to use a sextant to plot where he is and his progress across the endless void of the ocean. Not sure why you try to plot your location or course when bobbing about uncontrollably in the ocean but it seemed important. Now sextant learning also requires the same sort of acting intensity as does bean eating. Long pauses and concerned stares to distant lands are ABSOLUTELY necessary all the while the camera being off to his left. It’s as if far off voices are whispering eternal truths while you figure out the angle of the sun to the horizon. You can almost feel that somewhere in that simple yet complicated device is the secret to preventing another Republican president!

Well, our hero eventually enters the SHIPPING ZONE as designated on his map. Is salvation at hand? No, the idiots in the huge container ship have not seen the exact same scene as in Castaway and rather than Tom Hanks being saved to find his wife has moved on, our hero is ignored like the truth on MSNBC. Even the teeny pencil flares he shoots are ignored by the capitalist pig shipping companies. Just when we hope that no one will find him and the movie will end, our hero spots a small light on the horizon. Like a tree sloth awakening from his afternoon nap, our hero jumps into action. He waves, he yells, HE STARTS A FIRE ON THE RUBBER RAFT to attract their attention. Unbelievably this causes the rubber in the raft to burn, which certainly creates a nice signal beacon, but also destroys the raft. As the distant light fades hope is lost; nay All is Lost and our hero stops treading water and gives up. Contrary to the laws of physics, his body begins to immediately sink in the salt water, and sink fast. To be fair, liberals don't normally recognize things like physics or logic, so we will give the "human body density compared to sea water density" thing a pass. Our hero now 147 feet under the water (where pressure would have burst his eardrums and the air in his lungs expanded to the point where he would have shot to the surface like a fart in a hot tub), we see a boat has arrived at the now burnt up raft and is searching for survivors. The flashlight spots our "in pretty good shape for his age" hero 147 feet under water and he is inspired to swim to the surface with movements reminiscent of a slug which has been generously sprinkled with salt. When he finally breaches the surface, his wrinkly, skin cancer-spotted hand is clutched by the slightly brown skinned hand of one of our third world brothers, thus confirming that the simple, stone-age ways of the oppressed, starving masses are far superior to our hateful, cruel system of freedom and liberty and advancements in health, technology and sustenance. Ah, if only we could indoctrinate our youth in these eternal truths; perhaps we might enlist the help of college professors: nah.

Sadly, the rescuers turn out to be Muslim fanatics who slit our hero's throat and eat his salty liver. I made up that last part.

That's about it. If this movie or actor get an Academy Award it would be as ridiculous as if Al Gore got the Nobel Peace Prize; what? Al Gore DID get a Nobel. That's it. I give up. Game over, man. Damn dirty Apes! Until next time.

PS This summary was produced over two weeks time and does not indicate that I waste hours of work time; really.