2 Best Movies to Watch by Mona Lee Fultz

Staff & contributors

Narrated by the familiar voice of Jack Black, Apollo 10 ½ is a throwback story told with admirable specificity and imagination. Black plays a grown-up Stan, who looks back on his younger years with a mix of fondness and wonder: how did they get away with the things they did then? American suburbia in the 1960s was both loose and conservative, caught between a generation holding on to the reins of the earlier century and one eager to launch into the next. 

Stan, as the youngest child of a big, rowdy family, gives us a charming look into the times, as well as a projection of his own fascination: Apollo 11 and the space age. He inserts himself in this monumental narrative and generously brings us along in his fantasy. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Stan’s recruitment by NASA is actually fact or fiction, but that’s part of the fun, especially since Stan himself doesn’t seem to mind at all.

Genre: Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Drama, Family, History, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Science Fiction

Actor: Avery Joy Davis, Bill Wise, Brent A. Riggs, Brian Villalobos, Buzz Aldrin, Christian Moran, David DeLao, Glen Powell, Holt Boggs, Jack Black, Janis Joplin, Jennifer Griffin, Jessica Brynn Cohen, John F. Kennedy, John Kaler, Josh Wiggins, Keslee Blalock, Larry Jack Dotson, Lee Eddy, Milo Coy, Mona Lee Fultz, Natalie L'Amoreaux, Neil Armstrong, Nick Stevenson, Richard Nixon, Samuel Davis, Walter Cronkite, Zachary Levi

Director: Richard Linklater

Rating: PG-13

Waking Life is composed exclusively of a series of conversations involving the main character, with him sometimes participating and sometimes just as a spectator. The discussions revolve around issues such as metaphysics, free will, social philosophy or the meaning of life. The title refers to a quote from Jorge Santayana: "sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.", and the whole movie wanders around the state of a lucid dream, emphasized by the rotoscoping technique in which it was filmed. Waking Life is not just a movie worth watching, it is a movie worth watching a thousand times, because you will always notice something that you have previously missed out.

Genre: Animation, Drama, Fantasy

Actor: Adam Goldberg, Alex Jones, Bill Wise, Caveh Zahedi, Charles Gunning, Ethan Hawke, Glover Gill, Jason Liebrecht, Jeanine Attaway, John Christensen, Julie Delpy, Kelly Rebecca Nichols, Ken Webster, Kim Krizan, Lorelei Linklater, Louis Black, Mona Lee Fultz, Nicky Katt, Peter Atherton, Richard Linklater, Ryan Power, Steve Brudniak, Steve Fitch, Steven Prince, Steven Soderbergh, Timothy "Speed" Levitch, Trevor Jack Brooks, Wiley Wiggins

Director: Richard Linklater

Rating: R