Giant Freakin Robot

Even if you don’t recognize Drew Struzan’s name, I guarantee you would recognize his work. The legendary artist has provided some of the most iconic poster art in science fiction film history. All six Star Wars films? You bet. All three Back to the Future movies? Absolutely. Blade Runner, The Thing, Goonies, Indiana Jones, and Big Trouble in Little China? You better believe it. But it stands to reason that sometimes the perfect poster goes through a bit of revision before it achieves its final brilliance. Case in point, check out all the unused designs Struzan experimented with for the Back to the Future films before deciding on the three mirrored images used for the final posters, which you can see up top.

Membership in The American Society of Cinematographers is the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a professional cinematographer. The organization is not a guild or a labor union, but rather a prestigious group of selected professionals, which has been giving out its Lifetime Achievement Award since 1987 to the very best in the industry.

As reported on The Dissolve, cinematographer Dean Cundey will be receiving the ASC’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Cundey’s work in film is iconic and invaluable to cinema as a whole. He has worked with some great genre directors, such as John Carpenter, Robert Zemeckis, and Steven Spielberg. Cundey’s work contributed to the eerie tone of such great science fiction and horror films as Halloween, The Fog, and Escape from New York.

The most important film Cundey worked on for John Carpenter was the director’s 1982 classic The Thing. Cundey recalled his experience working with the genre director:

…our first venture into a major studio film [...] a great experience because we now had at our disposal all of the things that we couldn’t afford before: large stages and a very experienced production designer; a lot more equipment and facilities. So it was a great introduction into mainstream Hollywood.

I’m a big fan of the New York-based improv group Improv Everywhere. Over the years they’ve staged stunts such as freezing dozens of people in place inside Grand Central Station, staging a talk show interview in a working subway car, and talking a “suicide jumper” down from a four-foot ledge. Nevertheless, I gave them a mixed review last week for two of their recent stunts. The Ghostbusters prank that had three ghosts invading a library, only to be chased out by guys with proton packs, that was awesome. Their slow-motion Matrix fight in the middle of a department store, however, left something to be desired. Now they’ve fully redeemed themselves in my eyes with the clever Back to the Future stunt up above.

If there’s one thing that unites those of us who grew up in the ‘80s — aside from having way better kids movies — it’s the sweet rush of nostalgia when we hear some chirpy 8-bit composition that takes us back to the hours spent in front of a Nintendo trying to navigate a chubby Italian plumber through a series of incorrect castles. There’s just something about hearing a tune stripped down and piped through a woefully inadequate sound system that puts a smile on my face, and makes me want to go download an NES emulator.

First a quick warning: there’s nothing crude or naked in the below video, but there is some hilarious, over-the-top violence. Don’t click play if you have a sensitive boss standing behind you. Also, shouldn’t you be working?

“Save The Clock Tower! Save The Clock Tower!”

It has been precisely 28 years since the beginning of Back to the Future on October 25, 1985. Soon it will be 2015 and we’ll get to experience the future that was depicted in Back to the Future Part II, and eventually we’ll be able to time travel back to the old west, like in Back to the Future Part III. For now, however, a few fans of the franchise wanted to celebrate the anniversary, and took to Twitter to do so.

The Hill Valley Project created a new Twitter account for each and every character in Back To The Future in order to re-create the entire movie in real time on the Internet. If you head over there you’ll find a tweet of every line in the movie. Since the stream is taking place in real time, (at the moment of writing this post) the fans are at the part of the movie after the McFly family first have dinner and Marty is sleeping before he has to meet Doc Brown at Twin Pines Mall.