So Daniel sent us this one. He wants a roundup of the ten most boring and unnecessary documentaries ever produced. Real films, real runtimes. The ones that somehow got made despite having no clear audience, no discernible thesis, or a subject so narrow it defies all justification. Feature-length films about parking lots. Meandering portraits of minor figures nobody asked about. Seven-hour explorations of a single office building.
Oh, I love this. This is my kind of rabbit hole. The documentary form, pushed to its most indulgent, niche, and perplexing corners.
What if I told you someone actually made a ten-hour documentary about watching paint dry? And it's not a metaphor. It's a single, static shot of white paint drying on a brick wall for ten hours and seven minutes.
That's 'Paint Drying' by Charlie Shackleton, two thousand sixteen. It was a literal protest piece against UK film censorship laws, designed to force the British Board of Film Classification to sit through it and charge them for the privilege. It's the apex of the form.
By the way, today's script is being powered by DeepSeek V three point two.
A fittingly patient model for the topic. So, we're celebrating these films. Affectionate ribbing, not a mean-spirited pile-on. Because the first example that always comes to my mind is 'The Parking Lot Movie' from two thousand ten. Seventy-two minutes. About the attendants at a single parking lot in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Seventy-two minutes. About a parking lot.
Directed by Meghan Eckman. It exists because she became fascinated by the philosophical musings of the attendants, many of them students and musicians. It's a portrait of a specific, transient subculture. What makes it spectacularly unnecessary is that it takes a location most people actively try to spend zero time in and asks you to live there for over an hour.
It’s the perfect entry point. So where do we even start with a list like this? Do we go chronologically, or by ascending levels of sheer bafflement?
I think we have to build toward the peak of the unnecessary. Start with films that are merely perplexing, and work our way up to the monumental achievements in cinematic endurance. So, let's dim the lights and open with number ten.
Actually, before we get to number ten, we should probably define our terms. What makes a documentary 'boring and unnecessary' for this list? It's not just a slow film.
Right. The criteria, as I see it, is a combination of factors. First, no clear audience. Who is this for? Second, no discernible thesis, or a thesis so banal it evaporates on contact. And third, a subject so narrow it defies conventional justification. A seven-hour film about a single office building isn't about architecture or labor; it's about the filmmaker's obsession.
So it's not that minimalist or observational documentaries are inherently bad. It's when the focus becomes so myopic, so devoid of external resonance, that you have to ask about the allocation of resources. Time, money, festival slots.
And that's the key distinction between a focused, minimalist documentary and a self-indulgent one. A great minimalist doc uses its constraints to reveal something universal. A self-indulgent one mistakes the constraint itself for the revelation. 'Look at this thing I filmed for a very long time.'
And we have to clarify the tone. We love documentaries. That's why we can critique their excesses. This is an affectionate ribbing from people who've probably seen too many of them.
It's a roast by enthusiasts. The question of whether 'unnecessary' is a valid critique of art is fascinating. I'd argue yes, but not as a final judgment. It's a starting point for analysis. Why was this necessary for the filmmaker? What ecosystem allowed it to exist?
Which is the other part of this. These films don't get made in a vacuum. They're enabled by a whole support structure: niche streaming platforms desperate for content, academic grants for 'experimental non-fiction', film festival programmers looking for the next bold, endurance-testing experience.
A film like 'The Works and Days of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin', an eight-hour portrait of a Japanese farmer, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. That's a major A-list festival. There's institutional appetite for this. It's a badge of cultural rigor.
So it's a symbiotic relationship. The filmmaker's obsessive vision meets a curator's desire to showcase something defiantly uncommercial. The audience, if there is one, is almost an afterthought.
Which brings us back to our list. These are the films that represent the outer boundaries of that relationship. The stress tests for the documentary form itself. So, are we ready to see what fails that test?
I suppose we must. On to number ten. The floor is yours, walking encyclopedia.
Thank you. That brings us to number ten: 'The Iron Ministry' from 2014. Directed by J.P. Sniadecki, it's an eighty-two minute sensory portrait shot entirely on trains in China over a three-year period.
A sensory portrait. That's a fancy way of saying there's no narrative, no interviews, no explanatory titles.
Precisely. It's just… the experience of being on a Chinese train. The clatter, the crowds, the snippets of conversation, the landscape blurring past. Sniadecki is an ethnographic filmmaker, and his stated goal was to capture the feeling of a society in motion, using the train as a microcosm. It exists as a piece of visual anthropology.
And what makes it spectacularly unnecessary?
The complete and total lack of entry point. It assumes you are as fascinated by the granular, uncontextualized details of Chinese rail travel as the filmmaker is. For eighty-two minutes. There's no arc, no character to follow, no thesis beyond 'trains exist and are full of people'. The technical execution is actually quite beautiful—the sound design is immersive—but it serves to bury you deeper in the mundane reality, not elevate it into a story. It's a film that mistakes its own access for insight.
So the internal logic is pure academic observation. 'I am a camera. Here is what the camera saw.' The pitfall is expecting an audience to share that specific, duration-heavy fascination.
Right. It premiered at festivals like Locarno and got a niche release. It's for a very specific type of viewer, a type who probably uses the word 'haptic' unironically. On to number nine, which takes the concept of duration and makes it the entire point. Andy Warhol's 'Sleep' from nineteen sixty-four.
Ah, the classic. How long are we talking?
The original runtime was five hours and twenty-one minutes. It is a single, static shot, with only minor changes in camera position, of the poet John Giorno sleeping.
I have so many questions. Who funded this? Who watched it?
Warhol funded it himself, part of his factory output. Reports say it had a single paying customer for its full premiere run. The ticket price was five dollars. It exists as Warhol's deliberate provocation against narrative cinema, against entertainment, against the very idea of audience engagement. It's the ultimate endurance test.
So its necessity is purely conceptual. It's a piece of art theory manifested as a film. The thing that makes it unnecessary as a documentary is that it documents nothing of consequence. A man sleeps. We all sleep. The film offers no new information about sleep, about John Giorno, about the nature of rest. It's a monument to the banality of its own premise.
And yet, it's secretly foundational. It's the ur-text for the entire 'slow cinema' movement. By stripping everything away, it forces you to confront your own expectations of what a film should do. Is it boring? Unquestionably. Is it unnecessary? As a piece of entertainment, yes. As a cultural artifact that broke the form open, arguably not. That's the Warhol paradox.
It’s the first film on our list where the 'unnecessary' quality is the entire artistic statement. A tough act to follow, but number eight manages by applying that obsessive focus to a genuine mystery. 'Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles'.
Directed by Jon Foy, released in two thousand eleven. Eighty-six minutes. It documents the investigation into the Toynbee tiles—these strange linoleum tiles embedded in asphalt streets across North and South America, with an obscure message about resurrecting the dead on Jupiter.
Okay, that sounds fascinating. A street art mystery. Why is this on the list?
Because the mystery is, by any reasonable measure, incredibly niche. Maybe a dozen people in the world actively cared about it before this film. Foy and his friends become obsessed, and the film follows their rabbit-hole investigation. It exists because of that pure, uncompromising obsession. The filmmaker became the audience.
And the spectacularly unnecessary part?
The sheer depth of resources poured into solving a puzzle that has zero stakes. They travel, they interview conspiracy theorists, they analyze materials. It's treated with the gravity of a Kennedy assassination documentary. The film is competently made, even suspenseful in moments, but you finish it and think… this could have been a twenty-minute YouTube video. The feature-length treatment imbues this weird, minor phenomenon with a weight it cannot possibly sustain.
So the internal logic is the logic of any hobbyist who’s fallen too far down the rabbit hole. 'This is the most important thing in the world because I've spent five years looking at it.' The film makes you feel that intensity, but also makes you acutely aware of its disproportion.
It’s a film that proves you can make a compelling documentary about literally anything if you film it like a thriller. The subject’s inherent unimportance becomes part of the texture. Next, number seven: 'The Source Family'.
A cult documentary? Those are a dime a dozen.
This one is from two thousand twelve, directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos. Ninety-eight minutes. It's a portrait of Father Yod, born Jim Baker, the leader of a seventies New Age cult in Los Angeles called The Source Family. He had fourteen wives, started a vegetarian restaurant, and recorded truly terrible psychedelic rock music.
I’ve never heard of him. Or the cult.
Precisely. That's the point. It's not the Peoples Temple, it's not the Manson Family. It's a minor, quirky, largely forgotten footnote of California weirdness. The film exists because the directors found a treasure trove of archival footage and decided to tell a comprehensive story. It's meticulously researched, filled with interviews with former members.
And the unnecessary critique?
It's a feature-length documentary about a figure who merits, at most, a chapter in a book about LA fringe groups. The film treats Father Yod with a solemnity and narrative heft that feels unearned. It’s a perfectly competent, even informative film, but it begs the question: did this story need a ninety-eight minute documentary, or did the existence of the footage simply justify its own creation? It’s a documentary that confuses completeness with necessity.
So we've moved from sensory portraits and conceptual art to… exhaustive footnotes. This feels like a progression. Which brings us to number six, and you flagged this as the 'secretly brilliant' entry.
Yes. 'Hands on a Hard Body'. Nineteen ninety-seven. Directed by S.R. Bindler. Ninety-seven minutes. The premise is the ultimate in Texas minimalism: it documents a real contest in Longview, Texas, where contestants must stand with one hand on a brand-new Nissan Hardbody truck. The last person standing wins the truck.
That's the whole film? People standing around a truck?
That's it. For ninety-seven minutes. It follows a handful of contestants over the four-day contest. The sleep deprivation, the mental breakdowns, the strategies, the tiny dramas. It exists because Bindler stumbled upon the contest and recognized the raw, strange human theater of it.
And you think it's brilliant.
I do. Because it uses that incredibly narrow, seemingly absurd premise as a lens to examine huge themes: American consumerism, endurance, faith, desperation, and community. The truck is a MacGuffin. The film is really about the people, and the contest is just the pressure cooker that forces their characters out. The technical execution is straightforward, but the editing is sharp. It finds profound moments in the mundane—a woman singing gospel to keep her spirits up, a man’s monologue about his lucky cap.
So what separates this from, say, the parking lot movie? Both are about people in a specific, mundane location.
The difference is in the inherent drama and the universality of the desire. Everyone understands wanting to win something. The contest provides a built-in narrative arc and stakes that a parking lot, philosophically interesting as it may be, simply doesn't have. 'Hands on a Hard Body' takes its unnecessary premise and, through sheer human observation, makes it necessary. It’s the exception that proves our rule. A film about nothing that becomes a film about everything.
A high note to end this batch on. So we've got sensory trains, sleeping poets, tile detectives, forgotten cults, and a truck-touching contest. If these are the lower half of the list, I'm afraid of what the top five have in store.
Oh, you should be. If you thought these were deep cuts into obscurity, buckle up. Our top five take the concept of 'narrow focus' and launch it into the stratosphere. We're talking eight-hour farm portraits, corporate art films, and the single most famous boring movie ever made.
Stratosphere is right. Let's start with number five. I'm bracing myself.
Number five is 'The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)'. Directed by C.W. Winter and Anders Edström, released in two thousand twenty. The runtime is eight hours and three minutes.
Eight hours. About a farmer.
About a seventy-year-old female farmer in rural Japan, yes. It's a portrait of her daily life, her work, the landscape, the passage of seasons. It's composed of long, static takes. A single shot of her washing vegetables can last ten minutes. It exists squarely within the 'slow cinema' tradition, aiming for a meditative, immersive experience that rejects conventional narrative.
And it premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. An A-list festival programmed an eight-hour film about vegetable washing.
It did. Which tells you everything about the festival ecosystem that allows these films to exist. It was funded through a combination of Swedish and Japanese arts council grants, university support, and likely the filmmakers' own savings. The internal logic is pure artistic austerity: by forcing you to experience time at the pace of agricultural life, the film aims to create a profound, almost spiritual connection to its subject.
The spectacularly unnecessary part seems self-evident. But break it down.
The subject is so narrow, and the treatment so extreme, that it becomes a parody of its own artistic aims. After the fourth hour, the meditative intent can curdle into pure tedium. It mistakes duration for depth. The film argues that to understand this woman's life, you must live it in real time, cinematically. But that's a philosophical claim, not an artistic one that justifies asking an audience for an entire workday of their attention. It's a film made for critics and programmers who can praise its rigor, not for viewers who actually want to watch it.
So it's the festival darling as endurance test. A badge of honor for the viewer who survives it. That feels like a theme. Number four.
Number four shifts from the rural to the institutional. 'The Museum of Modern Art, New York' from nineteen fifty-nine. Directed by Willard Van Dyke. Sixty minutes.
That sounds like a promotional film.
It is, essentially. Commissioned by MoMA itself. It's a narration-free, score-heavy tour of the museum's galleries and sculpture garden. It just… shows you the art. No context, no interviews with curators, no history of the museum. It exists as a corporate film, a piece of institutional branding posing as avant-garde cinema because it lacks a narrator.
And the unnecessary critique?
It's a sixty-minute commercial that pretends it isn't one. It's unnecessary because its function—showing you the art in the museum—is better served by actually going to the museum. Or, if it must be a film, by a film that tells you something about the art or the institution. This is pure visual cataloging. It's the cinematic equivalent of a slideshow. It has the sheen of art because it's in a museum, but it's just a very long, very expensive brochure.
So this is the 'unnecessary' born of corporate vanity, rather than artistic obsession. A different flavor. Okay, number three. I have a feeling I know what's coming.
You do. The ur-text. Andy Warhol's 'Empire'. Nineteen sixty-four. Eight hours and five minutes of a static, silent shot of the Empire State Building, filmed from a single window at the Rockefeller Center.
The ultimate Warhol. Even more than 'Sleep'.
This is the purest expression of his philosophy. It's not about the building. It's about time, perception, and the frame itself. The film exists as a direct challenge to everything cinema was supposed to be. It has no characters, no plot, no movement beyond the gradual change of light and the occasional flicker of a room light in a distant window. It was originally screened at sixteen frames per second to make it even longer.
And its legacy is that it's the most famous boring movie ever made. It's the reference point. So why is it 'unnecessary' and not just 'important'?
Because its importance is entirely conceptual. As a film to be watched, it is the definition of unnecessary. It offers no experience you cannot get by staring at a building yourself. Its value is as a thought experiment captured on celluloid. The spectacular thing is that Warhol, and the cultural apparatus that followed, convinced the world that this thought experiment needed to be eight hours long and presented as a movie. It's the apex of the art world's ability to sanctify the deliberately mundane. It's necessary for film history, but utterly unnecessary as a piece of consumable media.
Which brings us to number two. And this is the controversial one. 'Shoah'.
Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour and twenty-six-minute Holocaust documentary from nineteen eighty-five. This is the trickiest entry, because the subject is perhaps the most necessary of the twentieth century. The film consists entirely of present-day interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, interspersed with shots of the empty locations where the atrocities occurred. No archival footage is used.
So the 'unnecessary' part isn't the subject. It's the form.
Lanzmann's rigorous, punishing methodology. He rejects historical narration, he rejects archival imagery. He forces you to confront the past solely through the words of those who were there and the haunting emptiness of the places now. The film exists as a monumental act of memory, an attempt to create a definitive oral history. It is a masterpiece of documentary form.
And yet, for our list…
For our list, the 'unnecessary' quality is the extreme, self-imposed rigidity of that form. The nine-and-a-half-hour runtime is not an accident; it's a statement. But it's a statement that creates a barrier to engagement so high it becomes a form of gatekeeping. The common pitfall with 'Shoah' is that its monumental importance is used to shield it from any critique of its pacing, its repetitions, its deliberate opacity. You are made to feel that if you find it slow, that's a moral failing on your part. But a film can be both a necessary historical document and, in its execution, contain stretches that are punishingly, perhaps unnecessarily, meticulous. Including it here is a provocation to separate a work's moral weight from its cinematic choices.
That's a careful distinction. It's not saying the film shouldn't exist. It's saying its chosen form represents the outer extreme of documentary austerity, to the point where the form itself becomes a subject of debate. A nine-hour interview-only film is, by conventional standards, an unnecessary approach. But Lanzmann decided the convention was insufficient.
Right. It's the pinnacle of 'unnecessary' as a deliberate, high-stakes artistic choice. Which makes it the perfect foil for our number one. The film where 'unnecessary' is the entire, glorious, literal point. Charlie Shackleton's 'Paint Drying' from two thousand sixteen.
Ten hours and seven minutes. A single, static shot of a white painted brick wall.
Six hundred and seven minutes, to be precise. It was created specifically to protest the British Board of Film Classification's fees. Shackleton raised money through a crowdfunding campaign to cover the BBFC's costs, then submitted this film. The BBFC, by law, had to watch every second to classify it. He incurred the maximum cost to the board to make a point about censorship.
So it exists as an activist stunt. A bureaucratic weapon.
Yes. It is the most purely functional unnecessary documentary ever made. Its purpose was to waste the time and money of a government body. The subject is literally nothing happening. The runtime is a calculated middle finger. What makes it the apex of our list is that it has no artistic pretensions. It's not slow cinema. It's not a meditation. It's a ten-hour proof of concept for the absurdity of its own existence. It is spectacularly, gloriously, intentionally unnecessary. It is the platonic ideal of the boring documentary.
And it worked. It got its classification—a U rating, universal suitability—and it made its point. So in the end, the most unnecessary film of all might be the most necessary as a piece of political protest.
That's the beautiful paradox. It sits at the top of our list not because it's the worst, but because it is the most perfect, self-aware embodiment of the concept. It is boring and unnecessary by design, and that design had a clear, successful outcome. It turns the form's indulgence into a tool.
So if that film is the perfect embodiment, what's the actual takeaway? Why should we care about films designed to be ignored or that test the very limits of our attention?
I think the first, most practical insight is that these documentaries serve as a stress test for the entire form. They define the outer boundaries. By seeing what happens at the extremes—a ten-hour static shot, an eight-hour farm portrait—we understand what the center is. They show us what documentary can technically do, even if it probably shouldn't.
It's like probing the edges of a map. You find the point where 'documentary' bleeds into 'performance art' or 'bureaucratic protest' or 'corporate vanity project'. That line is fuzzier than we think.
And that leads to the second point. These films, in their spectacular failure or their niche success, remind us that the subject is not the sole measure of a film's value. 'Hands on a Hard Body' has a ridiculous premise but finds universal themes. 'Paint Drying' has no subject at all but has a potent political function. Perspective and craft matter. A film about the most thrilling subject in the world can be boring if it's made poorly. A film about watching grass grow can be compelling if the filmmaker has a unique eye and a clear point of view.
Even when they fail, they're instructive. 'The Museum of Modern Art' film fails because its craft is just competent cataloging—it has no perspective. It shows us that a point of view is the non-negotiable ingredient. Without it, you're just recording things.
Right. So what can a listener actually do with this? I'd suggest a small, personal experiment. Seek out one of these 'unnecessary' documentaries. Not to enjoy it, necessarily, but to understand your own tolerance. Watch twenty minutes of 'The Iron Ministry' or seek out the shorter 'Parking Lot Movie'. Actively analyze why it works or doesn't work for you. It's a calibration exercise. It will make you a more discerning viewer of all media, because you'll appreciate the narrative techniques and editorial choices in mainstream docs that much more.
It's like drinking a neat espresso to appreciate the milk in your latte.
That's a surprisingly good analogy. The hidden value, especially now, is that these are pure, uncompromising acts of human curiosity. Or obstinacy. In an age of algorithmic content designed to maximize engagement, these films are gloriously indifferent to whether you watch them. They weren't made by a content-optimization engine. They were made because a person became obsessed with parking lots, or train sounds, or the texture of drying paint. That human idiosyncrasy has a value all its own, even when the result is a cinematic sleeping pill.
So the prescription is to occasionally subject yourself to something authentically, humanly boring. As a counterbalance to the hyper-stimulating scroll.
Consider it mindfulness training for your media diet. If you can find something to appreciate in a seven-minute static shot of a cabbage field, you've unlocked a new level of perception. And if you can't, you've at least defined your own boundary. That's a win.
So the results of that experiment are a spectrum, from 'I found hidden genius' to 'I have lost ten minutes of my life I will never get back.' But it raises the bigger question. Here in twenty twenty-six, with attention spans supposedly shrinking by the second, is there still a place for the eight-hour farm portrait? Do these films have a future, or are they relics of a pre-streaming, grant-funded world?
I think they have a more important place than ever, precisely because of the attention economy. The future implication that fascinates me is the rise of AI-generated content. We're about to be flooded with perfectly competent, algorithmically optimized documentaries on every conceivable topic, generated in minutes. And I suspect that flood will create a countervailing hunger for the authentically, humanly boring. The work that is slow not because a prompt demanded it, but because a person was stubborn. The film that exists because of a singular, inexplicable obsession.
So the ultimate unnecessary documentary might become a status symbol. A badge of authentic human creation in a sea of synthetic media. 'I watched all ten hours of Paint Drying and it was made by a guy with a grudge, not a diffusion model.'
The most unnecessary documentary becomes a necessary counterpoint. It's the grit in the oyster. In a hyper-stimulating media landscape designed to trigger dopamine hits every three seconds, the act of sitting with something that refuses to stimulate you is a radical, almost philosophical stance. It's a protest against the scroll.
Our final thought, then. The list we just went through—from the parking lot to the drying paint—isn't just a catalogue of indulgent failures. It's a map of the outer limits of human focus. These films ask, 'What is the minimum viable amount of information or action required to constitute a movie?' And they each give a different, often absurd, answer.
And sometimes, the answer is 'none.' And that's okay. So next time you're doomscrolling, consider instead watching paint dry. Literally. For ten hours. You might not enjoy it, but you'll definitely have an experience no algorithm planned for you.
I'll stick to my leaf medicine, but I appreciate the sentiment. That's our show. A huge thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping the trains running, and to Modal for providing the serverless GPUs that power our weird pipeline. This episode was, by the way, scripted by our friendly neighborhood AI, DeepSeek V three point two.
We hope it passed the boredom stress test. If you enjoyed this tour of cinematic endurance, please leave us a review wherever you listen. It helps more people find the show. All our episodes are at myweirdprompts.com.
This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Corn.
And I'm Herman Poppleberry. Until next time.
