Respect Authority

Later today, a dozen complete losers will descend on Times Square to participate in the Netflix-sponsored Movie Watching World Championship, wherein they will be forced to watch 60 films in a row, many of which have been chosen for their sheer tedium.

Trapped in a Truman Show-esque Plexiglass theater, the participants are hoping to break the current Guinness record of endurance movie watching, which currently stands at a whopping 120 hours and 23 minutes – or approximately five days.

Among the contestants are, I expect, a bunch of people with truly dismal social lives, including New Yorker Crazy Legs Conti, who in addition to having one of the most ridiculous names in human history, also participated in Coney Island’s hot dog eating contest earlier this year. Lucky for Crazy Legs, training for the two separate events was probably easy to do simultaneously.

The contest comes on top of not only the stalwart hot-dog race, which has been inducing nausea in onlookers since 1916, but also in the midst of similar “Look how lazy I can be!” competitions like endurance TV-watching and video game playing. It’s a sad world when watching The Biggest Loser becomes reassurance that some of us may survive natural selection after all.

More importantly, in the era of Fear Factor and Trading Spouses, asking shockingly lame individuals to chain-watch boring movies just isn’t enough. My vote is for a competition where participants have to watch the same movie 60 times in a row. In this version, the winner has the benefit of not only lasting the longest, but also of being the only contestant to maintain their sanity. And just to get the ball rolling, I’ve made some cinematic suggestions:

1. Bewitched (Rotten Tomatoes rating: 25%)

2. Wild Wild West (21%)

3. Showgirls (14%)

4. Catwoman (10%)

5. Medley of Crossroads (25%), Gigli(6%) and Glitter(6%)

Don’t forget the popcorn!