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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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.

Takashi Miike is probably the most well known and beloved of the Asian Extreme directors. He has directed 75 films in under 20 years including 40 this decade alone. With all that production you have to have some misses and he does. I have seen probably 30 of his films and a lot of his Yakuza films run together a bit. For those not up on Japanese cinema a HUGE percentage of their live action films are based on organized crime. Imagine if they released 100 mobster films in the US. Out of control. The Yakuza is bigger part of Japanese culture than the mob is here, but they still release an insane amount of these films. Some of his biggest successes have been in this genre like Ichi The Killer and Dead Or Alive, but it is his taste for the bizarre that has really made him well known. He became well known in the US after directing the horror film Audition. The film an almost boring romantic film for the first hour and then suddenly breaks your neck with one of the more horrific torture scenes ever put to film. He is one of my favorite directors and if you continue reading I am going to break down my three favorites from the master of the strange. All my favorites are from 2001 a year in which he directed 7 full length films. There is no more fucked up director than Miike. Oh yeah, one other thing, he directs children’s films too… although I can’t imagine what parent in their right mind would let their kid see The Great Yokai War.

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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.

Before 1988 I pretty much listened to music my parents made me listen to: The Beatles, The Monkees, and a lot of Jimmy Buffet. The first music I ever owned I got for X-Mas from my Aunt: Michael Jackson’s Thriller on vinyl. It came out in ’82, but I probably didn’t get it until X-Mas ’84. It might have been ’83, but I have a pretty clear memory of dancing to Michael Jackson in pre-school and I was born in 1980 so I am not sure if I remember much of anything that happened in 1983. I do have vivid memories of wanting Regan to win in 1984. So back to my point. In 1988 I was in the second grade and I really started to listen to music on my own. The rock songs I remember being into were Born In The USA by the Boss and We Didn’t Start The Fire by Billy Joel. Other than that I only listened to Hip Hop. Run DMC, Fresh Prince, LL Cool J and mostly Young MC. In the 4th grade I switched schools and this popular kid Stephen Salyer told me to listen to this top 40 radio station in DC called WAVA. (Strangely that same kids’ brother played me Nirvana for the first time. I heard Bleach before Nevermind was out but I couldn’t stand it.) From 1990 – Valentines Day 1992 I listened to nothing but top 40 music, most of which was rap. On Valentines day WAVA switched formats to Contemporary Christian music. That day I moved the dial over to WJFK and started listening to Howard Stern in the morning and pretty much listened to exclusively Nirvana (who I got into after hearing their Incesticide Album) until Kurt Cobain killed himself and I started listening to exclusively to punk rock until 1999 when I moved into a dorm room with a guy who hated punk and loved Dave Mathews. We made a deal: No punk for me and no Dave Mathews for him. We could however agree on one music and that coincidentally was old school hip hop and I was back to the beginning. Anyway, there is a lot of music that I listened to from 1989 to 1992 that were HUGE hits to me, but no one really remembers because of another huge hit on that album. I want to talk to you about three of those secondary hits today. So my three favorite forgotten hits 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.

Welcome to the first addition of A Few Of My Favorite Things. To start things off I am going to talk about my three favorite Blaxploitation films. I probably know more about Blaxploitation that anyone you have ever met. I have seen over 50 Blaxploitation films and in college wrote a 20 page research paper on the genre. For those not familiar will Blaxploitation film, or Exploitation film let me give you a quick explanation. Exploitation films are not called exploitation because they exploit anyone… they are called this because they exploit certain elements in a film that are sure to sell tickets. These elements include violence, sex, action, or after 1971 all black films. Some of the more notable exploitation genres are slasher flicks, women in prison, spaghetti westerns (will be featured on this site soon), Sexploitation, biker films, and kung fu films. These films were made cheaply and mostly badly. As long as you had a good trailer and had the elements of your genre you could pretty much sell the film. In 1970 there had not been many films made for a black audience. People did not really think that you could market to that crowd. Melvin Van Peebles thought otherwise. In 1971 at great risk to himself he wrote, directed and stared in a film called Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadasss Song. I am not a huge fan of the film, but it changed everything forever. Aside from starting the career of Earth Wind and Fire, the movie showed Hollywood that there was a black audience to exploit. In 1972 Shaft and Superfly were released to great commercial success. After that EVERYONE wanted to make black films. Between 1972 and 1975 nearly 100 of these films were made before people got sick of the low production values and rehashed plots. A sequel to Blacula may have been to much for anyone to handle. That being said, without these films modern black films and urban culture would be so different from what it is now. So now that you know what’s what… let’s get to my favorites after the break.

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