Oh my god, there has been SO much boring anime lately. Often, it's stuff that looks really promising/has beautiful animation, but is just crushingly, crushingly dull.
.hack in all its incarnations; this has been discussed.
Twelve Kingdoms, in a lot of ways; although it was conceptually interesting and often had beautiful art, it just dragged out every event until I wanted to die. And then just when there's an interesting build-up, all of a sudden the storyline would switch to three episodes of something boring going on elsewhere. Pa. C. Ing. It was… er... stately.
Then there was "UtaKata", which I watched on someone's high, high recommendation for a series that "picked up as it went along". It didn't. Twelve year old girls VERY SLOWLY learning life lessons, and then summoning magical incarnations to easily solve incredibly trivial problems. And it was all so serious.
Finally, Ghost in the Shell: The Movie, II. This one literally put my friend to sleep in the theater, and I nearly dozed off too. Lovely, interesting, high quality animation and good sci fi material, but my god. The dialogue was something like this:
guy one: Perhaps we should head out.
guy two: "Going is coming back again".
guy one: Heh. "true voyage is return".
guy two. But "you can never go home again."
guy one. And yet "the heart resides in the chest."
guy two: "birds sing sweeter in brambles."
guy one: "but true love prevails."
guy two: meaningful expression
three minutes of birds flying by
(On the other end of the spectrum, there's Kodocha, which was so spastic and ADD that I couldn't watch it. Happy medium, please.)