This Gawker article got me thinking… Thinking enough to bring back “A Few Of My Favorite Things”!

A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that sometimes appears on weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

I have never really been scared of movies in my life. I like a lot of horror films, but usually the ones I like are just really creepy or gory, I am never really scared by them. I remember when I realized this. I had just watched The Blair Witch Project on it’s first run. I am not sure if you remember, but before it became a big hit, it played only in a few cities. I think it was only playing in one theater in the DC area and I had to drive quite a ways to see it. At that time people were saying that it was real. Of course by the end, it was pretty clear that it was fake, but going in I thought I was watching some sort of documentary or something. By the end of the movie all my friends I went with were freaked out, and I wasn’t. I just kept thinking, “The worst thing that is going to happen is that they are going to die.” I sort of realized then I don’t fear death. This of course is bullshit, I just don’t fear theatrical death. I am sure that put in an actual life or death situation I would pee myself. So anyway I started thinking back to the movies in my life that did scare me and I came up with three. Keep reading to find out which.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

So Charlton Heston died yesterday. This is tragic. I know most of you probably think of him as this crazy right wing gun nut, but I love him. He is honestly one of my favorite actors. Yes, he was amazing in his historic and bible epics, and yes he played a convincing Mexican in the second best Orson Wells movie, but I love him for his SciFi. I am not normally a science fiction fan. I own about 1000 movies on DVD, but my science fiction section has only about a dozen movies… of those five have Charlton Heston movies… and three more of them are Planet Of The Apes 3-5 which while do not have Heston in them, could not exist with him. So today, in honor of the man I am going to break down my three favorite SciFi movies starring Mr. Heston, which coincidentally also happen to be my three favorite Heston movies in general. Keep reading after the break.
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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Since I just wrote up Be Kind Rewind I decided it would be a good time to do a Favorite Things about one of my favorite directors, Michel Gondry. The first time I saw Eternal Sunshine I became obsessed with Gondry. I started trying to track down all his music videos. I got a big help when PALM released their Directors Label series which featured Gondry. It had a pretty good collection of his videos. When comparing it to the Spike Jonze DVD I realized that I was not as into the musicians Gondry worked with. I loved the videos though and I found myself watching Bjork videos despite hating her music. His videos got me into several bands and complete inspired me. I couldn’t come up with just three favorites, but I tried to do my best… so keep reading to see three of my favorite Michel Gondry videos.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday. In honor of this greatest of holidays I am going to be talking about three great football plays. Now, because of NFL’s fascist control over their highlights I can’t show you my favorite plays… or the favorite NFL moments I have had… in fact, I am not even going to be able to show you all of the plays that I am going to talk about. One of these clips is going to be from Tecmo Bowl. Anyway, I am sort of obsessed with football. I try not to mention it on here too much, but I do run a Miami Dolphins website (Bonus Link: me talking Dolphins football on FinsRadio.com) As you may or may not know, the Dolphins are the only team to have gone undefeated. Today our devision rivals, the New England Patriots attempt to become the first team since the Dolphins did it in 1972 to win every game. This I am not happy about. So I am root, root rooting for my home team and praying that some how the Giants can win this game. It is not likely, but I pray. Anyway, all my favorite football moments involve the Dolphins, and there are almost no Dolphins highlights online, so instead I am going to bring you three amazing football plays, for three different reasons. Keep reading to find out which.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

I have a handful of movies that I break out when I really need to impress someone. If I think someone is really amazing, I invite them over and watch some insanely twisted movie with me that I know will blow them away. 9 times out of 10 it is an Asian Extreme film… Battle Royale or maybe something by Takashi Miike or Park Chan Wook. It was hard to narrow films down to just three… I figure too many people know Battle Royale, and not everyone can appreciate a film like Salo or the 45 minute rape scene in I Spit On Your Grave… and speaking of rape scenes, Irreversible is not a film I want to watch over and over again so showing that to people is sort of out. I can usually judge a persons character by how much they appreciate Wayne’s World (unless they are really young… or really old) so that spends a lot of time in my DVD player. But, when I really thought about it, I came up with three films that I show people over and over again, that have never failed to fuck up the minds of the friends and well wishers I invite over. Keep reading to find out the top 3 films that you need to bump to the top of your Netflix queue.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Last week I talked about how I couldn’t find my very favorite commercial jingles and I still can’t, but I did find some pretty great ones. The ones I can’t find were local DC commercials that I grew up with and the old AutoZone commercial which was sweet, but does not seem to exist on the internets. I did find some good stuff. Also, I just wanted to give a shout out to the Human Giant sketch that inspired todays post…. and part 2. Lastly I wanted to mention that this might be the last Favorite Things for the next two weeks because I will be out of town. Anyway, keep reading to listen to some amazing commercial jingles!

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Today I spent a while looking for my favorite commercial jingles for this post but I couldn’t find the old Autozone commercial or the National Tire Warehouse commercial so I decided to come up with something else. While searching I ran into a He-Man commercial and I thought to write up my favorite toys as a kid… but everyone knows about He-Man and Transformers and Thundercats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so I decided to talk about some of the more obscure toys that I played with. Unless you were born between 1977 and 1983 or had siblings who were you probably won’t have any idea what this stuff is… Keep reading to find out my favorites.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

In my life I have listened to a lot of music. Most of it is very up tempo and aggressive. I like music with great energy. I dig the anger of punk, the beat of hip hop and the dancability of electro… Once in a while though, I like to just sit back and relax. I need music to make out to. I touched boobs for the first time while listening to Bleach by Nirvana, which of course was awesome, but it’s not quite the same thing as making out on a bed listening to Marvin Gaye. I am very picky about my R&B. I am not a huge Motown fan and with the exception of R Kelly I don’t listen to any modern R&B. That being said there are a few artists, most of whom had been making hits for decades, made s super smooth seductive songs of the 70’s blow my mind. Keep reading to find out my three favorites of the decade.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Klaus Kinski is one of my favorite actors in theory. The dozen or so film I have seen with him in them I have loved, mostly his films with director Werner Herzog and a number of Spaghetti Westerns. That being said he has made over 100 films and I wouldn’t even know where to start. The films I have seen though blew me away. The 5 films he made with Herzog are generally considered the best of his long career. I got in to both Herzog and Kinski after watching a documentary Herzog made about their “friendship” during those five films called “My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski”. They had a tumultuous relationship at best. On top of film acting Kinski was in many, many plays and wrote one of the most insane books that I have ever read. He also went on public speaking tours where he would just scream at the audience about Jesus. He also claims to have had sex with both his mother and his daughter (Natasha Kinski). Total fucking nut job, unbelievable actor. Keep reading to find out my three favorite Kinski scenes of all time.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

From the day Kurt Kobain died in 1994 until I went to college in 1999 I listened to almost exclusively punk rock music. I have a pretty amazing 7″ record collection from that time period. I had a record label and ran a zine and supported my local scene DIY till you die, etc. I went to probably 2-3 shows a week during that entire period. Punk rock was my life. I mostly focused on local DC area bands, but I had my national favorites too. A lot of these bands rarely toured and with not much internet at the time the only way I heard these bands was buying comp CDs, getting mix tapes from my friends or reading the reviews in MRR or Flipside. I used to do so much mail order, ordering music from all over the country. I used to write back and forth with these bands. I thought it was amazing that my favorite bands would hand write me letters with shit I ordered. It instilled this weird mentality in me that makes me very unimpressed with musicians that I meet. For example, if I met an actor in a movie, I might get really excited, but meeting famous musicians has never been exciting to me (except when I hung out with Weird Al). Anyway, my three favorite punk bands in the mid-1990’s were all local bands who I hung out with daily and who I put out records by, and have no video footage to show you, so I am going to skip them and just talk about my three favorite national acts. Keep reading to find out who they are.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

I have never been a big fan of musical theater. I did see Hairspray, but that is just because I am obsessed with John Waters and have a thing for movies about race, rock and roll and Baltimore. However for some reason a few of my favorite movies ever happen to be musicals. Clearly if you know my taste, these are not going to be the classical musicals. I mean I can’t stand West Side Story and only watched Cabaret because I had a one night stand with a girl who looked just like Liza Minelli and I had just watched Arthur 2. There are some sweet classical musicals I dig, but most of them involve the Nicholas Brothers or some kind of tap dancing which I think is amazing. On an unrelated note, although related to that Nicholas Brothers clip, when I was 15 I was obsessed with Cab Calloway, which I think is the most culturally inappropriate music a 15 year old suburban white kid living in the 1990’s could possibly dig on. 1930’s Harlem big band is not exactly Pearl Jam. Anyway, back to musicals. For some reason, despite my generally dismissive attitude towards musicals there are a few of them I watch over and over again. Check out my top 3 favorites after the jump:

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

So evidently my childhood hero Patrick Dempsey is on Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t know what that is, but I assume it is some sort of TV program that I have never watched because I am too cool for TV. Wait, no I am not that guy. I do own a TV, I don’t have cable or anything, but my roommate seems to watch Scrubs several times every night. I just have never seen Grey’s Anatomy nor do I know what it is about. What I do know is that in the early 90’s Patrick Dempsey was my idle. He was so nerdy yet so cool. In 1990’s I went to a new school and I got picked on a lot. I liked all these girls but I didn’t think I had a chance. Patrick Dempsey shouldn’t have had a chance either, but he was the nice guy and in the movies all the girls fell in love with him in the end after dumping their abusive jock boyfriend. Keep reading to relive my top three favorite coming of age stories of all time.
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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

I have a pretty decent record collection and since I don’t own a CD player, I am pretty much listening to vinyl or mp3s.  I never really saw the point in buying new music on record.  If I could get it on CD I was happy to go that route.  Because of this my record collection consists of three main groups: mid 90’s punk 7″, hip hop and dance singles and music recorded before the invention of CD’s.  When I am hanging out in my room or about to go to sleep I mostly want to listen to full length LP’s so the singles don’t get nearly as much play these days.  While DEVO and Hall and Oates get their due, I find myself listening to mostly old rock and 70’s soul.  Side 1 of Menagerie by Bill Withers gets a lot of play as does T-Rex’s Electric Warrior.  But the music I find myself coming back to again and again is movie soundtracks.  I have never been much of a sound track guy in the CD world, but for some reason I own probably two dozen CD soundtracks on record.  It was really hard to narrow down just three.  I already talked about my fascination with Blaxploitation in an older Favorite Things, so my Shaft and Superfly soundtracks are out, and I mentioned the very punk rock Return Of The Living Dead sound track in my Zombie write up… so that helped narrow down things a bit.  So read on to hear about my three favorite soundtracks that I on on vinyl.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

The other day I met this really cute girl who told me she was going to film school so she could make music videos. The only problem was she didn’t really know anything about them. I am no expert or anything but I made a date with her so she could come over and watch music videos with her. I probably have about 15 music video DVDs and get pretty excited about my favorite ones. The be all and end all of music video DVDs are the PALM Pictures Directors Label series. They are releasing extensive DVD’s of the best music video directors around. Although I am still waiting for the Jonas Akerlund and David Fincher ones… Of the PALM discs the one I am most into is the Spike Jonze one. Michel Gondry’s disc is brilliant, that guy is on a whole new level, but Jonze disc has my favorite music, features, and I can relate most to his stuff. If you don’t know Jonez music video work, you know his movies. He directed Adaptation and Being John Malkovich and he just finished a live action version of Where The Wild Things Are. On top of that he was amazing as an actor in David O. Russel’s Three Kings. Anyway, after the jump I am going to give you my three favorite Spike Jonze music videos. I hope you dig them as much as I do.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Welcome to the Halloween edition of Favorite Things, my weekend blog about three things I dig. Today we are talking about zombies. I love zombies. I got into an argument the other day with someone who tried to say that vampires were better than zombies. That is just bullshit. Vampires are fucking boring. If you get eaten by a vampire… guess what? You get to live forever. Get bit by a zombie? You are just constantly hungry for brains and the chances are someone alive, who is much faster than you, is going to come a long with a shovel or a shotgun and detach your head from your body. That is scary. I am not a big horror buff, but I am a zombie fan. My horror section is probably 60% zombie films. One of my favorite movies of all time is Dawn Of The Dead. Just thinking about it gets me all excited. I sort of want to live the rest of my life in an abandoned shopping mall actually. It is so spooky. Sean Of The Dead was pretty fantastic too… it was probably the funniest horror movie I have ever seen. I have all the Evil Dead movies including the Necronomicon special editions that scream when you press them. I own at least two Re-Animators and Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive and about a dozen more (Redneck Zombies anyone?). Anyway, zombies are amazing and not just because they moan a lot and eat brains… they do a lot of other things too. After the jump I am going to break down my three favorite things that zombies do, so please, read on.

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