Tony Scott - RIP

Film director Tony Scott sadly committed suicide on Sunday. He was 68 years old.

Reports are still flying out, trying to find the reason for his sudden departure. The most prevailing news is that he was recently diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer.

Tony Scott, alongside with his older brother Ridley, was part of a new wave of British and European directors with a keen quality look to their films, even if the story didn't have much weight. Though breaking through with his first feature, the cult film The Hunger, his biggest success came in 1986, where he ruled over the American pop culture with Top Gun. From the slick MTV visuals to the heavy emphasis on pop songs and adrenaline-producing action, the film utterly dominated the landscape and jump-started the career of Tom Cruise.

The MTV look continued with Beverly Hills Cop 2, replacing Kenny Loggins with Bob Seger at the top of the charts and continuing his new partnership with mega-producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Once the 1990's hit, Tony greatly increased his commercial popularity. He made many films that would later and still fill up TV schedules, with his best being the Tarantino-scripted True Romance and the tense submarine film Crimson Tide.

With 1998's Enemy at the State to the present, Tony started to make the action genre more jarring, with an increase use of hand-held camerawork and breaking the barriers all around his films so hard that subtitles would be ingrained inside the frame. He also began a new relationship with Denzel Washington, which started with Crimson Tide but became more fruitful with Man on Fire, Deja Vu, The Taking of Pelham 123, and his final film Unstoppable.

He will be missed.