Moon

This is one of the best sci-fi and/or indie films I've seen in a long time. How can you go wrong with Kevin Spacey as the voice of "the computer" on a lonely one-man outpost on the moon? This film is the story of that one man (Sam Bell, played brilliantly by Sam Rockwell) running a plant that harvests helium-3, a super efficient and clean-burning fuel that solves all of Earth's energy problems. It's only available on the dark side of the moon, and Sam is the lucky guy spending three years up there, accompanied only by the aforementioned AI. Moon is a tense, slow burn of a movie and I don't want to give anything else away. Do NOT watch any trailers because there are a lot of spoilers out there. This is my first movie pic not currently streaming on Netflix, but it's worth the wait for the DVD. Go get it.

A Town Called Panic

This was a great recommendation from a friend, and my son's first foray into subtitled movies. A Town Called Panic (Pannique au Village) is a truly bizarre stop-motion animation adventure featuring 3 cheap plastic toys (Horse, Cowboy, and Indian) as the main protagonists. The first plot point involves dealing with 50 million bricks by accident and it just gets weirder from there, including a trip to the earth's core, a donkey drummer, and a giant robot penguin. The film's creators clearly had a blast thinking like kids and just letting their imaginations stretch. Currently streaming on Netflix.

Scapegoat Wax

Hey, remember Jet Set Radio Future? Probably not: it was a video game about inline-skating graffiti artists that I only know because it came bundled with my Xbox about 12 years ago. It was a pretty fun game with a soundtrack that is now the stuff of legend in videogame hipster lore. A tune by hop-hop duo "Scapegoat Wax" surfaced on the radio recently and I looked them up on good old Spotify. Turns out they did a song from JSRF (Aisle 10) that I really dug. Their album Okeeblow isn't an all-time great by any stretch but there are some really solid tracks in this eclectic mix of rap, funk, and acoustic pop. "Aisle 10," "Freeway," and "Eardrum" are among the highlights