Reelin' (from the fumes)

Painting and movies have occupied our free time as of late.

(bedroom in progress--last room!)

We're on a roll with the movies thing. We realized that we rented Freeway and Mean Streets in the same night so we established the Road/Street/Avenue/et al theme. Other themes will follow once we get tired of this one or we run out of good movies. On this one, to date:

• Freeway---Keifer Sutherland plays a pedophile/serial killer and Reese Witherspoon is a feisty teenager. It's a lot funnier than it sounds. Also scarier. I recommend this film to everyone. Bizarre and sometimes hilarious. I laughed out loud more at this than anything else I've seen lately.
• Mean Streets---Johnny better pay up. Classic. Watch it again. Now.
  
• Horatio's Drive---2 men and a pit bull (yay!) make the first cross country road trip in 1903; a Ken Burns/PBS documentary. Excellent.
• A Streetcar Named Desire---I mean, come on. It's Marlon. Brando. Forget The Island of Dr. Moureau. Forget you ever saw that. This, this, is Marlon Brando. Excellent.

Then we went into Watch This! on Burnside to see if they had a better different selection than Hollywood video (duh). We told the ritalined-out Clerk about our theme and he recommended:

• Sunset Boulevard---Watched the Making Of from special features and it helped a lot: explaining the context of the movie, why it was hated/loved, the message, etc. Very very good movie. Nominated for 11 Oscars in 1951. "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."
• Pickup on South Street---A great noir with a love story even. Seriously, a good one.
  
• Mulholland Drive (tonight's feature)---We've seen it, but who watches a David Lynch movie once. You have to watch it twice just to get the characters straight.

Also, in case you haven't noticed:

Happy Fall.