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.

1. Can’t Buy Me Love – 1987
Can’t Buy Me Love was my favorite film from whenever it came out, to whenever Wayne’s World came out… after that Wayne’s World has held the #1 spot. Still, Can’t Buy Me Love is up there. It is about this nerd who mows lawns so he can buy a telescope because he is lower middle class and his parents won’t buy him one. When he is about to buy it, he sees that the popular girl of his dreams needs exactly the same amount of money to buy a hideous fringe suede dress because she is a spoiled rich girl who spilled wine on her MILF mom’s dress and she doesn’t want her mom to know she wore her dress or some such madness. So he gives her the money, but in trade she has to pretend that she is his girlfriend for a month because he thinks that will make him cool… and boy does it ever. He walks down the hall doing that cool top gun high five where you hit your hands from behind as you walk past. He wears sunglasses and ripped up shirts. Then there is some sort of conflict where people find out he is not actually popular so they hate him but then the girl falls in love with him anyway because of how nice he is. Now that I think about it, this movie really fucked up my life. I went around being nice to all the girls for the next decade and it got me nowhere. As soon as I started being an asshole I started getting girls. WTF? Patrick Dempsey? You lied to me and wasted my formative years!

PS. This movie was remade into a hilariously bad “urban” film called “Love Don’t Cost A Thing”.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiS42RHaKyg[/youtube]

Loverboy – 1989
A few years ago one of my best friends Barry mentioned to me that his favorite movie growing up was Loverboy. When I told him my favorite movie growing up also starred Patrick Dempsey we got really excited and had a Patrick Dempsey double feature. I had seen Loverboy when I was a kid but I had sort of forgotten about it, and I definitely didn’t realize how fucked up it was. It is about this lame kid… who somehow has a girlfriend… who is doing really badly in school. His dad tells him he is not going to pay for college and so he won’t get to see his girlfriend anymore or something. I am not exactly sure but somehow he needs to make money so he becomes a pizza delivery boy and then he becomes a prostitute for some reason. He never actually has sex with any of the women, but all these old soccer mom’s keep ordering pizzas with “extra anchovies” and he has to take care of their needs… but in a completely non sexual way because the movie was made for kids. I think most of Duce Bigalo: Male Gigalo was completely stolen from this Loverboy only Rob Schnider is no Patrick Dempsey. The fucked up part of the movie comes when his mom orders “extra anchovies” and he has to please her in the dark so she doesn’t know it is him…. okay, maybe that doesn’t happen exactly, but his mom does put in an order for “extra anchovies” which is just a twisted thing to show to little kids. I couldn’t find the trailer online but here are the first 10 minutes which include an absolutely dynamite opening credit sequence. You can watch the rest of the movie on YouTube here.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=l5mupG7OX0Y[/youtube]

3. Outbreak – 1995
Okay, the truth is other than Outbreak and With Honors (A madcap romp with a homeless Joe Pesci and the lovable Brendan Fraser) I have never seen another Patrick Dempsey movie… I just sort of love him anyway. I did like Outbreak a lot… I mean that monkey was soooo cute, and let’s be reasonable, everyone loves a deadly plague of biblical proportions. Also, I found a YouTube clip of every single Dempsey scene in the movie so I just HAD to post it. Evidently he is the first person to get outbroken and the reason lots of innocent people die! Get ready to enjoy some powerful acting. You know how they say you should never act with children or animals? Watch Dempsey knock that shit out of the ball park with his full on man on monkey action! Note to readers: Learn a lesson from Patrick Dempsey: DON’T FREE PLAGUE MONKEYS!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seR5mWSDqRk[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seR5mWSDqRk[/youtube]

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