See off the Obama presidency with Southside with You

Today is the last day of the Obama presidency, so we have a special recommendation from our latest batch of new titles.

Southside with You is a pretty risky concept – a romantic drama based on Barack and Michelle Obama's first date in Chicago. Casting the young Obamas while they're still in the public eye must have been extremely intimidating, but by all accounts, the film pulls it off pretty well. Critical reviews suggest that it's a great romance movie, even ignoring the fact that it happens to be about the current president.

If you want to get wistful, now is the chance. Southside with You is now available for checkout (HU DVD 13639). Grab it now, because the AU Library will be closed tomorrow in observance of Inauguration Day. If you're looking for something more timely for post-inauguration, consider Paul Verhoeven's movies about violence, capitalism, and mass media instead.

Watch some cyberpunk movies for Cyber Monday

Today is the increasingly dated-sounding Cyber Monday, an online sales day commemorated when people still had to use their workplace computers to get online. For an event with a name as silly as Cyber Monday, the only appropriate film genre to watch today is cyberpunk.

If you haven't seen any such movies before, cyberpunk is a loose subgenre of science fiction and crime set in near-future dystopias; films in the genre use overwhelming technology and huge corporations as a sounding board for social issues and exploring the idea of consciousness. That sounds vague – and elements have seeped into almost all modern blockbusters – but as consumer electronics exploded in the 80s through the early 2000s, it was a dominant genre.

We come not to taunt Cyber Monday's name but to praise it: like cyberpunk, it reflects a time of uncertainty and expectation about the future of technology. And decades later, they both sound pretty ridiculous.

A few recommendations:

Akira – HU DVD 433
Blade Runner – HU DVD 1064
Dark City – HU DVD 1992
Ghost in the Shell – HU DVD 5155
The Matrix – HU DVD 10154
RoboCop – DVD 8164
Strange Days – HU DVD 584
Total Recall – HU DVD 2040

What last night's Emmys mean for diversity on screen

via Yahoo

Last night's Emmy Awards highlighted the diversity of the nominees and winners, especially in contrast to this year's widely derided Oscars. The 2016 Emmys featured shows, stories, and artists from a wide spectrum of race, gender identity, and disability. Plus, we're happy any time Key & Peele wins an award. Nooice!

The Chicago Tribune published a great summary of why this year's ceremonies were different and how that different mattered creatively. Featuring an increasingly higher numbers of non-white nominees doesn't just capture the country more accurately; it also leads to greater diversity in subject matter, and the huge range of shows at the Emmys – including Master of None, Mr. Robot, and Orphan Black – reflects how media changes when you bring in new perspectives and voices. (There's also the added benefit that diverse representation may help ratings.)

If the Emmys are a sign of the general direction television is heading, diversity in perspective, representation, and talent are intertwined and growing. Take note, film!

If you want to understand the Emmys, start with Mad Men

The Emmys are tonight! We love a celebration of the best of television as much as anyone, but as with any award show, remember that the nomination process is highly political and probably reflects the tastes and temperament of the voting body more than an objective measure of quality.

It's interesting to see what Emmy voters broadly consider to be the most prestigious shows. The number-crunching wizards at FiveThirtyEight took a shot at quantifying the types of programs the Emmys love to nominate.

Generally speaking, sci-fi, fantasy and period dramas get nods for the technical awards. Late night comedy mops up for writing. Guest appearances on Law & Order will get you a nomination for acting. And right in the middle of all this is Mad Men, a show with a nomination pattern that matches the average Emmy show almost exactly. Unsurprisingly, that's one of the most award-friendly shows in the last decade.

That article is super stats-wonky, but the point is that the Emmys have their own predictable tastes and politics. A show like The Americans is more likely to appeal to Emmy voters than Bob's Burgers, even if Bob's Burgers is wonderful and terrific.

Alternative programming: Getting real about Rio

from Rio de Janeiro: Urban Future

The 2016 Rio Olympics start tomorrow, and this year seems particularly fraught. Every Olympic event has some enormous, costly, potentially negative impact on its host – remember the broken hotels in Sochi and the wasted construction in Athens? – but Rio has it worst in recent memory. The Zika virus outbreak and hazardous water conditions are enough cause for alarm, but the government's ongoing anti-crime and urban renewal efforts have revealed the dangerous state of the city.

To learn more about the challenges facing Rio as it heads into the global spotlight, consider watching one of these three streaming documentaries. (You will need to log in with your AU username/password to access these.)

• Rio de Janeiro: Urban Future
  The Urban Future series looks at programs attempting to revitalize major cities. The Rio episode highlights the displacement of families living in neighborhoods razed to build Olympic facilities. What will happen to those communities after the Olympics are over and the buildings fall into disuse?

• The Road to Rio
  Monty Python's Michael Palin hosts this unexpectedly serious travelogue, where he describes the contrast between Rio's glitzy Olympic-friendly image and marginalized neighborhoods overrun with drugs as "a mixture of construction and ruin at the same time."

• Witness: Rio
  In the grimmest of the three documentaries, Eros Hoagland takes a camera into Rio's favelas document the city's violence and the effect of the police's attempts at "pacification."

An intro to double Palme d'Or winner Ken Loach

In a choice that shocked many critics, director Ken Loach won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival for I, Daniel Blake, a drama about a carpenter fighting for disability benefits. This is Loach's second Palme d'Or (a rare feat) after his 2006 Irish War of Independence film The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Already, film critics are debating whether his newest work is too "aggressively Loachian."

...but what does that mean? If you aren't familiar with social advocacy British cinema, you may not have encountered the director before. Ken Loach's films tend to address issues like welfare and labor with a focus on the realistic living conditions of the individuals affected. His 1969 film Kes, about a delinquent child with minimal family support who befriends a falcon, has often been considered one of the greatest British films of all time.

By all descriptions, I, Daniel Blake fits that mold for good or for ill; the filmmaker's work has been criticized as maudlin and unsubtle at its worst. We have a bunch of Loach's films in our collection – he's been active for six decades after all – so you can judge for yourself.

Sweet Sixteen – HU DVD 1133
Bread & Roses – HU DVD 2619
The Navigators – HU DVD 2653
The Wind That Shakes the Barley – HU DVD 3374
The Spirit of '45 – HU DVD 7594
Kes – HU DVD 8370
Ae Fond Kiss... – HU DVD 8803
Raining Stones – HU DVD 10683

Great Directors (interview with Loach) – Streaming video

After People v. O. J., a closer look at the Trial of the Century

The People v. O. J. Simpson, the first season of FX's American Crime Story, ended last night to thunderous reviews. For a generation that didn't live through the Simpson murder trial and never had to endure a year of Jay Leno monologue jokes, American Crime Story was a sensationalist look at a period of history that continues to explain so much about the current state of celebrity culture and race relations in America. Intrigue about O. J. and the trial are at their highest since 1995.

Viewers gripped to the show probably want to learn more; the obvious starting place is in the books written by the trial's participants. We'd also like to offer up two documentaries in our collection, one about the trial itself and one that shows the effect of the verdict.

First, watch American Justice: Why O. J. Simpson Won (HU DVD 11111), an A&E documentary hosted by Bill Kurtis about the legal and cultural significance of the case. The hour-long documentary includes interviews with Johnnie Cochran and Fred Goldman. A&E claims this is "the definitive wrap-up" of the trial, and it may be able to solidify the themes – however exaggerated – that the show introduced.

If you want to see a first-hand example of how Cochran's symbolic victory opened up discussions about police and race – if only on a cursory level – you can watch a streaming version of Racial Profiling and Law Enforcement: America in Black and White, ABC News's special report on racially motivated police practices produced three years after the trial ended. Its messages should come as no surprise to anyone following police violence in the past few years, but the special is clear evidence of these issues' heightened profile after the trial. The participation of prosecutor Christopher Darden is also telling evidence of trial's long shadow.

Again, sadly, you don't have to look far to see the same sort of racial discord. But if you want something more factual than the show, these two documentaries are a closer look at what happened in the trial, why it happened, and what it meant.

Almost fifty years later, you can finally watch the original Batman

This Friday's release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice marks the start of Ben Affleck's new take on Gotham's caped crusader. Batman's nearly eighty-year history has allowed for adaptations of his stories with a wide thematic range. For every dark Batman story about justice, there's another where Calendar Man appears (yes, that's a real Batman villain).

BvS certainly looks like it will fall on the dark end of the spectrum, and we can't think of a better contrast than the original 1966 Batman television series starring Adam West. You probably know this version's for its campy, colorful take on the Dark Knight... but you may not have ever actually seen it. The series was the subject of a decades-long dispute that prevented arguably the most fun and famous version of Batman from ever being seen again.

Adam West's Batman was produced years before anyone expected to worry about rights for television, and it shows. Warner Bros., ABC, 20th Century Fox, and the production company all had some stake in the series, and that knot took years to untie. Beyond that, some costumes, props, music cues, and background actors were not cleared for re-distribution. The series never saw the light of the day from when it ended in 1968 to the DVD release in 2014, apart from the occasional re-run on television.

For your viewing pleasure, we have the entire original series available to check out in the library. We're stunned that it took this long for such an iconic show to become available, but after endless legal wrangling, you can finally watch the show where the annoyingly catchy "Batman!" theme song came from. That one probably won't be in the new movie.

Batman, Season 1 – HU DVD 14261
Batman, Season 2 – HU DVD 14262
Batman, Season 3 – HU DVD 14263

A rough early road for the Irish in film

Still from Whom the Gods Destroy via "Unsung Divas of the Silent Screen"

While St. Patrick's Day is now a generally beloved holiday (we're going to grab Shamrock Shakes in a moment), it's easy to forget that much of the world was inhospitable to the Irish a century ago. The hostile attitudes toward the Irish continued through the early 20th century in the lead-up to the uprising in Ireland in 1916. In an interesting bit of timing, that coincides with the early days of film.

We found this lengthy but extremely in-depth article by Kevin Rockett from Trinity College Dublin about the representation of the Irish in pre-1916 films. To summarize, Ireland didn't have much of a film industry until World War I, so a majority of Irish representation on-screen was left to American producers. Only a few of these films depicted the Irish was menacing stereotypes; most of these films depicted Irish history just because of the interesting content. But more controversially, they scrubbed these stories of their more radical, political elements, possibly as an appeal for cultural assimilation and an attempt to quell the rising anger.

European audiences imported and generally enjoyed these films, but it wasn't until the rise of Ireland's nationalist cinema a few years later that the Irish found their cause represented on-screen. Rockett notes that those nationalist films depicting Irish rebellion sparked such a strong, violent reaction that the film was banned in multiple countries.

Even as critics and producers at the time tried to downplay film as only an entertainment medium and not a political one, the depictions in and outside of Ireland – discouraging versus embracing Irish identity – had a message associated with them. You can read that same thread into modern depictions of race on film too: you can't depict history without at least an implicit message.

This might be a little academic-y for St. Patrick's Day, but we were greatly interested in Rockett's take on this unexamined slice of film.

For our Metroless day: public transit videos from our collection

In an unprecedented move, the entire Metro system is closed today. Whether or not this was the right choice, it means that DC is spending the day without its main form of public transit. There isn't a documentary about the DC Metro (as far as we know) so we've gathered together three timely media items about this unusual transportation problem.

Firstly and perhaps most seriously, you can stream Subway City, a documentary about all the people who pass through New York's underground rail system. It's not just about the commuters who use it to get to work but "those who work there, those who live there, and those who commit crimes there." Infrastructure on the scale of a subway system changes a city, and this film is a neat peek at what that cultural indentation looks like. (And today, you're seeing what happens when that system disappears.)

Next, for a bit of a laugh, the old newsreel Futuristic Transportation Needs (also streaming) features brief clips of vehicles meant to be the future of transport that missed the mark by a mile. Our favorite is the Aérotrain, the giant Flash Gordon-looking hovertrain pictured above.

And just for good measure, we also have a copy of the How I Met Your Mother episode Subway Wars (HU DVD 11576, Disc 1) in which the main characters try to out-race each other using whatever transportation they can find. The subway-riders don't win, though mostly because of an emotional forfeit.

The Metro may be increasingly dangerous, but be glad that you don't have to ride the Aérotrain. Hopefully we're back to normal tomororw

Alternative programming: Vote if you can

Today is Super Tuesday, arguably the biggest day in the presidential primaries that could solidify each party's candidates for November. Like everyone else, we'll be watching the results as they trickle in tonight, and although we expect plenty of discussion about who did and didn't drive the vote in each state, we probably won't hear much about who couldn't vote. Around the county, voter ID laws intended to prevent fraud continue to obstruct the ability to vote, especially along racial and class divides. Regardless of the perceived benefits of such laws, that's a big problem.

Up until a court ruling last October partially overturned them, Super Tuesday state Texas had some of the strictest voting restriction laws in the country. In 2014, Bill Moyers covered the Texas law and the suppressive effects of voter ID laws on his syndicated PBS show in the episode "The Fight-and the Right-to Vote." Moyers elaborates on these problems with help from a member of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund and a writer for The Nation.

We'll no doubt hear all about campaign momentum tonight, but the people who don't get a voice in this process – by accident or by design – need a moment too. Thanks to Films On Demand for making this segment available streaming through the AU Library.

Top 5: Romantic movies for the disaffected

Valentine's Day is an arbitrary holiday designed to exploit relationship insecurities to prop up the floral and greeting card industries... so let's try to undermine the holiday while still celebrating it. Yay, it's Valentine's Day on Sunday!

Romantic comedies tend to tell milquetoast, often sociopathic stories based in Hollywood ideas romance; you can find plenty of them on our Romance Pinterest board. A few dare to go someplace weirder, darker, or less satisfying than the typical meet-cute story, and we'd like to highlight five standout examples. We briefly considered featuring some more nihilistic movies like Blue Valentine or Lars von Trier's Antichrist and Nymphomaniac, but we're sticking with the ones you could still honestly call romantic comedies.

• Punch-Drunk Love – HU DVD 677

Paul Thomas Anderson's collaboration with Adam Sandler famously gave the Grown Ups star a place to show his acting range beyond his usual man-child roles. The central romance story is equally sweet and unsettling, involving extortion from a phone sex line and pudding-related airline scam.

• Harold and Maude – HU DVD 1962

Not many romantic comedies deal with death to the gleeful extent of Harold and Maude. Young Harold's obsession with death and repeated mock suicides drives him into the arms of an elderly woman who helps him appreciate life. Critics derided the movie on its release for its overwhelmingly dark humor.

• Lars and the Real Girl – HU DVD 4598

Her staged a love story between a lonely man and an artificial intelligence. Lars and the Real Girl has Ryan Gosling romancing a sex doll. Though similar to Her in its outline, this is a decidedly sillier film but no less sentimental about the concept of love.

• Grosse Pointe Blank – HU DVD 7068

A film about a man in the doldrums of his career reconnecting with an old fling at a high school reunion sounds like old hat, but John Cusack's protagonist is a hitman. This is by far one of the most violent romance movies ever filmed; it all builds to a blood-soaked subversion of the typical proposal scene at the ending.

• Celeste and Jesse Forever – HU DVD 10951

We have to spoil this one: Celeste and Jesse divorce, and by the end, they have overcome their discomfort and amicably separate. It's extremely easy to mine failed relationships for endless will-they-won't-they tension (let's throw shade at How I Met Your Mother for this). In Celeste and Jesse Forever, the filmmakers are more honest about what would happen.

Our streaming video partners celebrate the less-known corners of Black History Month

Our friends at Kanopy and Docuseek2 provide access to some great documentaries, often ones with a socially conscious perspective. In time for Black History Month, both companies have collections dedicated to the American black experience – and they're stories you probably haven't heard before.

First up is Kanopy's African American History collection, a group of 14 films often about contemporary issues at the intersection of race, class, and culture. There are a number about history too: of particular interest is The Barber of Birmingham, a documentary about a barbershop owner who was a lifelong civil rights activist and held the American flag during the Selma march.

Docuseek2 also has a Black History Month playlist, which has a much stronger historical bent and focuses on undertold black history. The most exciting-sounding is Finally Got the News, a film about Detroit's League of Revolutionary Black Workers from the 1960s.

Both these sites supply AU with some terrific documentaries, and you owe it to yourself to watch at least one of their Black History Month selections. We're especially thankful that they turned their spotlight to parts of African-American history that are often overlooked.

Bill Clinton watched Groundhog Day while in office – and lots of comedies, oddly

Today is America's favorite non-holiday that we're all still obligated to talk about: Groundhog Day! The classic Bill Murray movie with that name came out 23 years ago this month and almost immediately had its fans – including, apparently, Bill Clinton.

That's a clumsy topical segue into a new list from Gizmodo's Matt Novak of every film Clinton watched while he was president. Novak previously rifled through public records for a list of everything Jimmy Carter watched, and Clinton's history is even more fascinating for its variety.

Groundhog Day was one of the first films Clinton watched after his inauguration in 1993, which set the tone for the hundreds of movies that followed. Where Carter's movie selections were defined by New Hollywood classics like The Godfather, Clinton watched far more new-release action movies and comedies. It just makes a lot of sense to read that he watched Demolition Man, Deep Impact, The Big Lebowski, Fight Club, and the third Naked Gun movie.

Novak argues that this surprisinglye exciting list might reflect that Clinton used the White House theater for entertaining visitors rather than his tastes. We chose to believe Bill Clinton was a Bill Murray fan.

Snow approaches! Lock yourself in with the best movie blizzards

via Giphy

Yes, a massive snowstorm will hit DC in about 24 hours. It will be big, possibly as large as if not larger than the Snowmageddon storm that locked down DC for a week in 2010 and caused some substantial damage on campus. If this is anywhere as bad as the experts predict, prepare to be locked in for a while.

If you plan to hunker in with your TV over the course of the storm, we recommend going for the absolute snowiest possible movies. Maybe you don't want to be reminded of what's happening outside, but arguably, there's no better timing for watching a film about totally oppressive weather.

For your consideration, we suggest the following cold, cold, classics. Stay safe and warm.

• Die Hard 2: Die Harder – HU DVD 446
  Though there's less snow in this one than others, a movie where a snowstorm delays flights at Dulles Airport is too real.

• The Thing – HU DVD 1410
  Want to feel grateful about being snowed in? At least you're not trapped inside with a shapeshifting monster that makes the Antarctic look pleasant by comparison.

• The Shining – HU DVD 2168
  Even if something otherworldly was involved, The Shining is still the all-time best argument in favor of mental health check-ins during cabin fever.

• Groundhog Day – HU DVD 2325
  A blizzard traps meteorologist Phil Connors in small-town Pennsylvania, and in an example we all should follow, his crew eventually gives up on trying to travel. 

• Fargo – HU DVD 2393
  Long, beautiful shots of snowy rural expanse make this one of the all-time greatest, coldest films. (It's great for other reasons too.)

• Dead Snow – HU DVD 7972
  Nazi zombies are unlikely in DC this weekend, but this Norwegian horror movie should scare anyone from wanting to head outside.

• Snowpiercer – HU DVD 11486
  Extreme global cold has become borderline weaponized by the elite in this recent sci-fi hit. Brace yourself when an arm is stuck out the window.

• The Day After Tomorrow – HU DVD 12586
  New York completely freezes over, and Jake Gyllenhaal becomes trapped in the library. We wouldn't know anything about that...

25 years ago, an Islamophobic film dented the public imagination

On this week in 1991, MGM released Not Without My Daughter, a drama film about a woman and her daughter held captive in Iran. It was hacky, received poor reviews, and generally flopped. It also carried the unusual, regrettable status as being one of the only American films about Iran at the time. For years, it served as one of the few contemporary pop culture depictions of Islam and the Middle East, and as Vulture tells it, that's an bad legacy.

In the film, an Iranian man effectively imprisons his American family in Iran after rediscovering his Islamic faith. Vulture's retrospective goes into the constant harmful portrayal of all these elements, from the vilification of Muslim men to the staging of Iran as an dark place. More troubling is the long-lasting impact of these depictions: reportedly, the film was been regularly shown in schools across the county as a cautionary tale about Iran – and was once even intentionally aired on television before a major soccer match against Iran to fire people up.

Gazelle Emami's article is a potent example of the ripple effect that even seemingly throwaway media can have on our beliefs and ideology. By all accounts, Not Without My Daughter is a forgettable, low-quality movie. But for a while, its charged representation of Iran and Islam was the only representation of Iran and Islam, and that influenced the public's perception.

Not Without My Daughter is available from our collection if you want to see it for yourself (HU DVD 2183). As an alternative, we recommend watching an expression of Iran from Iran itself, like the Academy Award-winning film A Separation (HU DVD 10336).

Alternative programming: Why run when you can ride?

Tonight is the library's annual Final Perk study boost event, this year rechristened as the marathon-themed Final Lap. That's a great metaphor, but we'll admit that this is a difficult topic for our collection. Frankly, not many running or track movies exist, almost all of them besides Forrest Gump are about the Olympics or Steve Prefontaine. How are we gonna come up with a tie-in for that?!

We want to recommend something lighter to help push you through finals. To riff loosely on the racing theme, our recommendation is Breaking Away (HU DVD 5172), a coming-of-age movie that has surprisingly fallen out of popularity despite an Oscar win and critical accolades.

The film tells the story of a group of high school graduates who join a university cycling race and – no surprises – stand up against the competition. Beyond from the big race scenes (which gadget site Stuff called "the best fictional road-bike action ever committed to film"), Breaking Away has the same triumphing-against-adversity, finish-line-crossing-ery spirit as tonight's study break.

You deserve a treat. Breaking Away is here and thematically appropriate. Grab it!

Farewell (again?) to Betamax

It's the end of an era that we thought had already ended. After nearly three decades of stubborn persistence, Sony has finally chosen to discontinue the Betamax videotape.

For those who missed out on the 80s, Betamax tapes were the main rival for VHSes before it was clear which videocassette format would be most popular. Betamax tapes had some clear benefits – compact size and higher image quality – but VHSes cost less to produce and attracted more publishers. (As legend tells, adult entertainment helped drive the sale of VHS machines more than Hollywood movies.) Although Betamax tapes lost the battle, they continued to find use as a recording format for professional film production. But it's unclear why Sony was still manufacturing them... or who was using them.

With the advent of streaming platforms that now almost universally work in browsers and on nearly an electronic device, it seems that we'll never have another "format war" as intense as what Betamax wrought. Device manufacturers and publishers will always fight over who gets the most popular content, but there's no longer a question of whether one of two whole mediums will become the global standard.

As anyone still setting on their pricey Betamax collection can attest, that's for the best.

Brave Wired blogger binges the entire Bond series for your benefit (and amusement)

From Moonraker, one of the Bond movies on the "Nah" list

James Bond's latest adventure, Spectre, hits theaters tomorrow. Reception on this one is decidedly mixed (Daniel Craig's Bond seems to get it right every other movie), but it will no doubt be a box office sensation here as it has been in the United Kingdom. Love the Bond movies or not – and there's plenty of room to talk about the franchise's sexism – the fact that this is the twenty-fourth film in a fifty-year-old franchise is remarkable and ripe for analysis. How have six different performers treated the role? And over five decades, has the series ever been consistently good?

Wired writer Erik Malinowski tackled the quality question this week in an article breaking down which of the Bond movies work and why. After an apparently 50-hour binge-watching session, Malinowski was able to split the movies roughly in half keepers and half throwaways, with the edge going to the better ones. Much of the article talks about the merits of each individual film, but there's a recurring pattern: the best Bonds are a little campy, thrilling but not too dark or angry, willing to acknowledge their cultural context, and featuring a strong supporting cast for Bond to play off of.

Malinowski's run down is of course subjective but makes a good primer if you needed a refresher on less-remembered Bonds before catching Spectre. If the reviews are credible, there's 14 movies on that list that you might just want to watch instead

(Our collection includes most of the Connery, Brosnan, and Craig films. Ask at our desk to see if they're available!)

DC rings in the official arrival of The Future

At long last, 26 years after the film's release, today is the day that Marty McFly and Doc Brown arrive in the future in Back to the Future Part II. Despite occupying only a fraction of the running time of the entire trilogy, the futuristic 2015 is one of the most iconic and memorable depictions of the future on film.

Dozens of websites have already covered what BTTFII got right and wrong about the distant future of 2015, so instead, let's round up all the Back to the Future-related happenings in the city today!

Reston, VA is the center of the biggest celebrations: as part of the Washington West International Film Festival, the city has changed its name to Hill Valley and will host a marathon screening of the trilogy at EXACTLY 7pm tonight. On Sunday, WWIFF will also screen a new documentary about the history of the series and a sold-out red carpet celebration featuring Doc Brown himself, Christopher Lloyd.

If you can't make it out to Reston, the Regal 14 in Gallery Place downtown will host a screening of BTTFII at 5pm... which we assume is as close as they could get to the 4:29pm, the exact time Marty and Doc arrive in the future. The Esquire Network will also run a marathon of the series throughout the day. (Our copy of Back to the Future II is already checked out, sorry! The original is still available though.)

And for the 21+ crowd, Fantom Comics in Dupont Circle will hold a Back to the Future celebration party this evening, complete with a costume and impression contest. Hill Valley-themed drinks are promised.

We could join the chorus bemoaning that we didn't get hoverboards or self-drying jackets, but instead, let's celebrate that our 2015 is exciting in different, totally unexpected ways. for instance, you're reading this blog post that I wrote from the basement of a library instead of a newspaper! Take that, USA Today!