We saw a trailer for the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. In an fit of pop culture conformity we decided to watch the last two Pirates movies since we’d only seen the 1st one.

We slogged through Dead Man’s Chest. Good movie? Not really, but it was fairly entertaining. We adore Bill Nighy and Johnny Depp is Johnny Depp.

Next, we tried to watch At World’s End. How bad could it be?

When I put it on the Netflix queue, one of the reviews said, “Everything you expect and less.”

That was an overly generous assessment.

Rotten Tomatoes tells the whole story. If only Rotten Tomatoes also told the actual story, because I have to tell you that the what was playing out on the screen was a stupid mess that didn’t make much sense.

When we paused the movie after nearly an hour and saw that it still had TWO HOURS LEFT we decided to watch an old episode of Charlie’s Angels and go to bed. We didn’t bother to finish watching the Pirates movie because it bored us to tears.

Let’s review: Husband and I. Quit. Watching.

We are the people who watched Hellbound in it’s entirety. Chuck Norris kickboxes the devil. And you root for the devil.

We are the people who watched Bloodrayne in it’s entirety. “Not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail”.

We are the people who watched every fucking episode of Galactica 1980 so you don’t have to.

We are the people who watched the Jayne Mansfield Story , a movie narrated by Arnold Schwartznegger. Before he learned to speak English even somewhat phonetically. Best line: “Buuuf Jaaaaaa Ahhh Lav Ewe.”

We are the people who watched William Shatner’s Incubus. Incubus, the 1st – and only – feature film entirely in the made-up language of Esperanto.

We are not an easily defeated people.

Sidenote: we’re watching Love and Other Drugs while I write this draft. Not boring at all, but I mention it because I’ve realized that the giant eyeballs of Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway are distracting when the two of them are onscreen together. These people can’t be a couple. If these people breed, they’ll give birth to fish-eyed babies. Really super-cute fish-eyed babies, but still, fish-eyed babies.

Where was I? Oh, right. Boredom. I’ve watched every single episode of Land of the Lost. To the best of my knowledge, the only people on Earth who can make that claim are me and Will Ferrel. He no doubt got an assload of cash out of the deal. I did not, but I probably should have.

You may think you’ve seen every episode of Land of the Lost, because they used to show the same 6 episodes over and over in rotation with other Sid and Marty Krofft shows on Saturday mornings. You have not seen every episode. There are FORTY-THREE episodes of Land of the Lost and if you try to watch them all they will crush your soul.

We didn’t give up on At World’s End immediately. We left it in the bluray player for a few days. Periodically, we’d sit in the living room and stare at the dark TV screen while trying to psych ourselves into finishing the movie.

Years ago, right after it opened, we went to see the Matrix. It hadn’t become a massive phenomenon yet, but the “What is the Matrix?” ad campaign and Keanu Reeve’s face were inescapable. Sometime in the middle of the 1st act, a couple came in and sat next to us. He was next to me, she was next to him.

5 minutes after they sat down the woman blurted, “Keanue Reeves is in this!”

She continued to talk.

5 minutes late she interrupted herself to blurt, “There’s Laurence Fishburne!”

I finally shamed them with my shushing and aggressively assertive dirty looks. Her boyfriend told her she needed to shut up because she was annoying everyone else. She finally seemed contrite.

A few minutes of blessed silence.

Then.

“Did I tell you your sister called?” He asked her.
“No, what’d she want?” She replied.
“She just called to say hi.”

When we tried to watch At World’s End, I found myself missing my old friends from the Matrix. Had they been here there at least would have been something coherent to listen to.

Hathaway. Gyllenhaal. Gigantic eyeballs.

Eventually we abandoned the idea of trying to slog through the rest of the movie. We took it out of the player. We looked at the disk as we put it back in the Netflix envelope. Even looking at the disk bored us.

Seriously, what are Jake and Anne’s combined ocular volume? It must be abnormally large. It can’t just be that they both have prominent orbital sockets.

I was going to take a staged photo of Husband looking bored while holding the At World’s End disk, but even the idea of getting the camera to take the picture bored us.

We actually own Hellbound, the Jayne Mansfield Story, and Galactica 1980. No one should own Bloodrayne.

You could argue that Ed Wood was boring, and you’d be right. But Ed Wood’s boringness was wrapped in a crunchy shell of exuberant wackiness that you can’t stop watching. You might lose consciousness, but later you’ll be sorry you did and you’ll try again and eventually you’ll finish the movie. Plus, Ed Wood’s movies were short. This Pirates thing? It’s 3 hours long. 3 hours of a plot better suited to a candybar commercial.

The average human eyeball weighs about 7.5 grams and has a volume of 5.5 cm3.

A movie can be inept and still have charm, or at least entertainment value. You can dress dogs up in fur remnants and call them Killer Shrews. You can drop the boom into the shot, put a pig mask on an otherwise naked Peter Coyote, or create a plot that’s so scientifically implausible even Glenn Beck knows it’s inaccurate. Just don’t be boring.

Don’t ever, ever, ever be boring. Boring is a sin.

I’d like to retract the statement about Peter Coyote and the pig mask. That was a terrible movie. Still, we finished watching it. Or we all passed out. I can’t say for sure – that was a long time ago.

At World’s End was so boring I can’t even blog about it without taking little breaks to think about other things. I’m not sure we’ll go to see the 4th installment, On Stranger Tides. It’s 3D and the trailer looks cool, but I remember people getting excited about the trailer for Waterworld, too, and look how well that turned out.