Okay, so as I mentioned in my Style Wars post below, I own like every 80’s hip hop movie. This fetish with these old school movies has led to my obsession with the horrible hip hop dance movies that follow in the tradition of Breakin’. Such films as You Got Served, Step Up and the latest in a the line, the soon to be classic Step Up 2.

I saw Step Up 2: The Streets in Richmond, because my friend Barry is the only person on Earth who would consider watching this movie with me. I have seen the last 5 Martin Lawrence movies with him, I saw Drum Line with him, I even saw Kangaroo Jack with him. (Although even Barry refused to watch Soul Plane with me). Anyway, after some convincing I got him to go with me.

The movie was a way better dance movie than Step Up and it might have had the best dancing in a film since You Got Served, but the plot was completely nonsensical and the acting was horrible. The one interesting thing about the film plot wise was that in the great tradition of films like Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, Honey and Fame the film is set up to end in a big talent show/ fundraiser thing. And then, they totally skipped the fundraiser so they could “take it to the streets”. It totally turned the table on traditional dance films and blew my mind…

But the most noticeable thing about the movie was how completely blatanly racist it was. The movie was about a white girl in an “urban” dance crew who then got kicked out and had to start a crew of art school drama queers. Her old crew, the bad guys, were predominately black or latino. Her new crew on the other hand only had two black people, who both were light skinned with straightened hair and were extremely non threatening. The crew also featured a completely stereotyped version of an Asian who during the final scene actually screams “I love America!” One of the major points of conflict is that the main white girl was in some sort or relationship with a black guy at the beginning, but she never actually kissed or touched him, but then she ended stuff with him for an Abercrombie wearing boy band looking motherfucker. Amazing. The makers of this film are appropriating black culture in order to both make money and at the same time undermine that same culture. It is actually pretty impressive. They are literally taking it to the streets.

So, in summary. Bad acting, good dancing, unapologetically racist.

PS. You would get extremely drunk if you took a drink every time a guy took off his shirt for no reason what so ever.

PPS. I just googled “Step Up 2, racism” and I found this article who describes Step Up 2 as “the single most racist movie that will be released by any major American studio in the first 10 years of the twenty-first century”. So I am not alone.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8P9leqyY20&feature=related[/youtube]
Low – Flo Rider Featuring T-Pain (Step Up 2: The Streets Soundtrack)

Naked Tuesday continues with behind the scenes photos from Joe Gallant’s new adult film Hell’s Kittens. I met Joe in Las Vegas and he is pretty amazing and he asked me to play a paparazzi (a stretch I know) in Hells Kittens. So now I can finally tell people I have been in a porn, although unfortunately I will not be naked. Fortunately for you, I may get some more chances to get dirty behind the scenes photos like this one. This one was shot at the Fuse Gallery. You can see some of Patrick O’Dell’s photos in the background.

The cool thing about doing the paparazzi thing was that while we were filming I had to actually take photos. I wanted to shoot quickly so I just turned my flash all the way down so it would recharge quickly, and I didn’t even look at the settings. Still I liked the way a few of them turned out. Check them out here before you even look at the nudie pix. And these are totally safe for work!

Anyway, I wanted to let you know about this movie straight from Joe’s mouth since I cannot possibly begin to grasp what it is about:

HELL’S KITTENS :A Vampire Supermodel Love Story.
Written/Directed by Joe Gallant, for Playboy/Spice Downtown
Starring Sarah Jesse, Victoria Sin, Darryl Hanah, Mya, Cheyenne and Miho. Also starring Nick Manning, Dino Bravo, Jack Fountain and Lou.

Vapid model-trash find themselves fucked, bitten and turned by a new race of future-humans. The government is hot on everyone’s trail, eager to wipe out this new breed. Anarchist polemic and hot, nasty, anal/atm throughout.

Just a little FYI… ATM does not stand for automatic teller machine or at the moment. It does in fact stand for ass to mouth. And if it is anything like his more recent film Ave X, it will be extremely fucked up.

PS. Miho is going by Miho now for some reason, but she was Mei on Burning Angel last I checked. Also if she ever does a solo set she will probably end up in my BA Gallery instead of my Girls Gallery, which makes this very fucking confusing.

Just click for pics already. NSFW. Lastly, the naked ones are way better than these down here that show nothing.

I got in a conversation last night with my friend Keith about product placement.  I think that a lot of people find product placement in films unbearable.  My friend Teddy is constantly screaming about it.  People hate having advertisements forced on us all the time.  But for me, for some reason, I find creative advertising really fun.  I like things marketed at me in interesting ways.  I think good advertising can be high art.  Now, if you are changing the script of your film to involve a product, or are just doing something boring like holding a Coke can label first at me I am not for it.  But if you can come up with an interesting way to integrate ad placement in a film that makes sense, I am all for it.  Why make up a fake product for your film, when you can get paid to use a real one.  Keith sent me to videos to prove his point which I thought I would share with you.  The first is a short documentary about product placement that is pretty funny, but very biased against product placement.  I agree with some of what they are saying, and some of this stuff is just out of line, but the guy interviewed in this video is a little out of control.  He seems so unreasonably upset about product placement.  Speaking of being unreasonably upset the second video is David Lynch being interviewed about what he thinks of product placement.  His succinct answer to the long winded question is priceless. It is even funnier than his take on the iPhone.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la4HAl4W1ZQ[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4wh_mc8hRE[/youtube]

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.

(Read the article)

Okay, so I am back from my trip and fully recovered.  I spent the whole weekend photographing celebrities holding products and over the next three days you will get to see the extremely boring photos from that event.  Trying to explain this whole thing is kinda hard, so you should just watch this video from myspaceTV that my friend Joe worked on.  I invited him and his crew to the event on Sunday and they did some question and answer stuff with some of the people involved.  It was a very weird experience.  I get interviewed near the beginning of the video.  Enjoy.

[myspace]http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=26669057[/myspace]

I found out yesterday that someone uploaded all of Teen Witch to YouTube for some insane reason.  I am not sure why it hasn’t been taken down yet, but it is pretty exciting.  For those of you not familiar with cult classic Teen Witch is about the most retarded film ever made.  It is about a girl who on her 16th birthday got magical powers.  Evidently it was originally going to be a spin off of Teen Wolf.  Anyway, she uses her spells to become popular.  Of course she abandons her “real friends” in the process only to realize that popularity isn’t the answer to all her problems and that her true friends were the real “cool kids”.  Oh wait.  That doesn’t happen.  The filmmakers just completely forgot about her real friends and drop them out of the movie around the half way point.  Also, for no reason the movie breaks out into high school musical style dance numbers.   It is so fucking weird that it must be seen.  Here is part one and two… For the rest click here.  Enjoy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFr8OznSqFY[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B04oVTDXHNA&feature=related[/youtube]

Jim Jarmusch is one of my favorite directors and one of his regular character actors was New York native, Rockets Redglare. Rockets was a criminal a drug addict and at times weighed more than 600 pounds… he was also adored by many, many people. His friend Luis Fernandez de la Reguera decided to make a documentary about his life called, strangely enough, Rockets Redglare!. The movie mostly consists of Rockets telling insane, fucked up and mostly horribly upsetting stories about his life and interviews with his friends talking about how much they love him and how much they worry about him. Rockets had many many problems, but was also very talented and it killed his friends to see him throw his life away on drugs and alcohol. I think most of us can relate to this story. I have a number of close friends who have wasted their talents because of some sort of addiction. The film is wonderful but pretty hard to get a hold of. The movie was released in 2003 but was not properly distributed which led to a law suit which de la Reguera and Steve Buscemi recently won. De la Reguera died in a motorcycle accident before the suit was settled, but I have heard that Buscemi is going to use the 1.75 million dollar settlement to promote and rerelease the film. If you get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it. It is pretty fucking unbelievable.

To get the trailer below to play, click on it and press the space bar.  Press space again to pause.

[quicktime]http://www.rocketsredglare.tv/rockets.mov[/quicktime]

Weird things are happening in my life.  I think that the next week or two is going to be slow around here.  I am going to make sure I post twice a day, but I am not going to be shooting a whole lot.  I am going out of town for a few days and I don’t know how much stuff I can get done.  I may put up a bunch of old video that I haven’t messed with yet.  I taped a Pete Holmes set last night and it was really great so as soon as I find the firewire cord to my camera I will get that online.

I have like three nudes sets to go up, but I want to spread them out a little bit.  One is going up today… I am thumb-nailing photos as we speak. I had a pretty crazy night last night, but I didn’t take too many photos and the ones I did take were naked and I might get yelled at for posting them… I gotta get some permissions and stuff first.  I was at Michael Stewart of Beauty Bar fame until like 7AM or something and he gave me some movies to watch.  I am currently watching The Point which is this weird children’s movie/ Harry Nilsson music video narrated by Ringo Starr.  It is pretty fucking weird.  Check it out while I try to get my shit together and get up these nudie pix.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5q903LceNU[/youtube]

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.

(Read the article)