A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, was talking this movie up like crazy.  He said we'd love it, it was about video games and pot smoking - okay, he said this to our social circle in general, who is into that kind of thing, which we are not so much, but we are familiar with it.

So we heard this movie was so awesome and of course we got it from Netflix, in fact I bumped it to the top.  And damn, were we disappointed.  It just didn't cut the mustard at all.  The only redeeming part of the movie was the chief nerd with his robot voice and neurotic twitches.  The star and his buddies and his granny were all just awful.  I really honestly did not like it.  The plot was okay, I guess, but the acting and directing were just BAD.

So yeah, I can't recommend this to anybody, sorry.  If I keep at least one of you away from it, it will have been worth watching it.

This movie is the worst movie I remember having seen, ever.  I fell asleep during Kill Bill: Volume I and Anastasia, but those were not as bad as Open Water.  In fact, the previous "worst movie I've ever seen," which was Bring It On 3: All or Nothing, was not even this bad.

Open Water is based on a true story, that of Tom and Eileen Lonergan, who went on a scuba trip along the Great Barrier Reef and were left behind by the dive boat because a crew member took a faulty head count.  Beyond that, the movie is fiction, of course, because we have no idea what happened to the Lonergans - we only know that some of their equipment washed up on beaches after they disappeared.

Open Water is not a horror movie.  It is not a psychological drama.  It is not about interpersonal relations.  It is utterly boring, the acting is wooden, the whole thing is just terrible.  Two people trapped in the middle of the ocean could be a really interesting movie, but Open Water is not that movie.  The main characters are whiny and annoying and the actors deliver the lines like they're reading the phone book.  For some reason there is a sequel being made...I can't imagine how bad that is going to be!

After we watched Open Water, my wife insisted that I had to let her watch something good for the rest of the night.  But what turned out to be on TV?  Bring It On 3 just happened to be on!  So I made her watch that too, and we just had an evening of really bad movies.

I caught Halle Berry's Catwoman at a friend's house.  We had just finished watching something else and this was coming up next.  We decided we would give it a few minutes, and if it sucked, we would change the channel.

Little did we realize that it would be so bad we'd end up watching the whole thing!

Seriously, this movie was just amazingly bad.  Halle Berry's acting has never been more fake, I've never seen her perform so badly.  This is not even the same actress that we know from X-Men, Gothika, or just about anything else she's done.  It's just THAT BAD.

And the movie itself has virtually no plot.  I remember glancing at the clock while we were watching, and I was amazed that we were 90 minutes into the film and it hadn't started yet!  It doesn't get much worse than Catwoman.  When it was in theaters I really wanted to see it but I am SO glad I didn't pay money for this.

So I had the TV on, right?  And I was, like, watching it?  And then I didn't know what to watch?  So I turned on White Chicks because I've never seen it?

Yeah, that was embarrassing.  Bad bad bad.

Fortunately I can redeem myself by watching the original Star Trek show for the next 11 hours on Sci-Fi Channel.

I'd like to forget I ever saw White Chicks, if that's okay with you.  Don't ever remind me of it, please.  It makes me cry.

The first was The Tomorrow People.  I picked this one sort of out of the blue, because I saw that it was:

1. British
2. Cult favorite
3. 1970s
4. Sci-fi
5. Teenagers

I can't lose, right?  Oh yes I can.  I think we might have watched half an episode before we were overwhelmed by the bad acting, bad effects, bad sets, and bad plot...and just had to shut it off.

The second was Two Shades of Blue.  We did actually watch this one all the way through, and it was bearable but supremely cheesy.  I picked this one because it co-starred Marlee Matlin and the main character gets a job as a relay operator so she can snoop on the personal calls of Marlee Matlin's character, who is the Assistant D.A. or something like that.  Did I mention it was cheesy?

One thing about this movie did impress me - they had an actual signer playing the interpreter.  Unlike Soundproof, which annoyed me because the "interpreter" was so bad, Two Shades of Blue had the ASL-fluent Beverly Nero in the role.  Granted, it wasn't much of a role, but she was there.  The movie treated Marlee's deafness in a unique way - I can't remember a movie in which I've heard her speak so much.  Her voice is perfectly clear, of course, but it seems most of her appearances are in signing-only roles.  (Then again, I never saw West Wing, so maybe she voices in that.)

The last movie we watched last night was a train wreck.  It's called The Joy of Life and I thought it was going to be good.  I thought it would be about a butch lesbian's experiences in San Francisco, along with information about the Golden Gate Bridge's role in about 1300 suicides.

The lesbian part was a lot of navel-gazing.  It was a narrative told over scenes of San Francisco - very long, slow shots that lasted a long time even when I had the fast-forward speed up to 30x.  It might have been interesting to read the story, but it just didn't work at all in movie format and I ended up skipping it completely.

The bridge part was a lot of shots of...the bridge.  With more voiceover.    It didn't tell me much I hadn't already learned from the San Francisco Chronicle's outstanding article Lethal Beauty, and I could have had the same effect by reading that article while looking at pictures of the bridge in another window.

So all in all, these movies were a waste.  I will have to pick some good movies and bump them to the top of my queue to make up for it.