When you’re talking about Ridley Scott movies, and I’m assuming this is right after your home sock puppet show, it becomes immediately apparent that he’s a rangy English bastard. Just when you think he’s a sci-fi director, he throws uber-lady power Thelma and Louise at ya. Then, after seeing G.I. Jane, you peg him as a “girl power” hero, and he rocks you up with Black Hawk Down. Okay, you say, continuing your odd internal monologue, this guy is all about the military. 2003 comes and he releases Matchstick Men, which proves he’s given up, completely thrown in the towel on making real movies. That proves not to be the case, because while 2010 saw him release one of his worst films (Robin Hood), this weekend he’s got a completely legit sci-fi “think piece” hitting theaters. He’s only getting stronger, or weaker, depending on what phase the moon is in. So let’s break down the thirteen major works of Ridley Scott, leaving Legend and A Good Year completely out of the conversation, mostly because I haven’t those two and no one really mentions them anyway. I blame the system, and HBO, for not allowing me to buy Game of Thrones on my Zune.

So then, Ridley Scott’s worst film EVAR?

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"Yes, Dave, my penis is huge. Would you like to see it?"

I read a piece on David Fincher recently where he described a distinction between “films” and “movies.” He says The Game is a movie, Fight Club is a film. “A movie is made for an audience and a film is made for an audience and the filmmakers,” he explained. The way I extrapolate that statement is that I imagine a film as something that asks and attempts to answer the big questions, whereas a movie just sort of references them to use as playthings. You could say it’s the difference between art and entertainment, but let’s not, because I’d rather piss hot thumb tacks than get hung up arguing the semantics of “art.” Point being, what I found most compelling about Prometheus was they way it keeps you wondering whether you’re watching a “movie” or a “film,” schlock or philosophy.

It starts off as your basic, rag-tag-team-of-scientists plot. Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green play a husband-and-wife team researching similarities between ancient civilizations’ depiction of aliens. I could go into more detail, but long story short, as Rapace says, “I think they want us to come and find them!” Yeah, totally, that’s why they got some cavemen to draw their planetary system in wooly mammoth dung and hid it inside a cave 2,000 years ago. “The humans are sure to figure this one out!” they were probably thinking. But Rapace and Green are convinced that the aliens are some kind of race of “engineers,” who created humans.

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Because there hadn’t been a new Prometheus clip or still in the last few hours and that simply wouldn’t do, Ridley Scott released (via his YouTube) this new short clip, “Prometheus has landed.” Prometheus is the name of the ship, get it?? The clip doesn’t show us a lot, but we do get a nice broad-side, money shot of the spaceship itself, a lá Michael Fassbender’s dong closeup at the beginning of Shame. Then Idris Elba tells the crew “brace for entry!” (insert Fassmember joke here) and they put on their seatbelts and grab their oh-shit handles, while Elba himself casually strolls through the cabin like it was a hotel lobby. He doesn’t even hold onto anything to stabilize himself, not even Michael Fassbender’s dong, which is probably the first thing I’d grab for if I was losing my balance on a spaceship. I guess the moral here is that even in space, black guys have really good balance.

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I’m red-green colorblind myself, so this could be a little off-base, but most of the trailers and spots we’ve seen from Prometheus thus far have seemed mostly grey and steel-colored and desaturated. In this new batch of 17 images released at EW, many from the set in Iceland (like the one above), we get lots of vivid blues and yellows. Neat? I mean, I like colors. Also, there’s Charlize Theron’s butt looking all hot in her supertight space pants. In fact, I put this picture at the top because it showed the most butt. That’s an old blogger trick.

After The Avengers and Dark Knight Rises, it seems like Prometheus, which opens June 8th, is the next most-anticipated movie of the summer. But that could just be my love of Robot F. Assbender talking. Look at him, I just want to go everywhere with him, experience the world through his gentle robot eyes.

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A kindly old man casually ponders your imminent vivisection

One of the upcoming projects I’m most excited about is The Counselor, the first original script from No Country For Old Men, etc. writer Cormac McCarthy, whose had his books and stories adapted to film many times before but has never written a script from scratch. I can’t wait to see unfiltered McCarthy (or less filtered, anyway), if only to see how many lapstrake catamites get joplinned down to the thrapple (I never know quite what he means, but it always sounds delightfully violent).

Last we heard, Ridley Scott is set to direct (I’ll believe it when I see it), Michael Fassbender was in talks for the lead, with Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz’s names all being mentioned. Today, Twitch and Deadline are reporting that Cameron Diaz is coming on to replace a previously-attached Angelina Jolie. Diaz would play a “femme fatale” named Malkina. Here’s how ThePlaylist describes the script, which they’ve read:

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