The first teaser trailer for director Ridley Scott‘s next movie, The Counselor, has found its way online. The movie is written by Cormac McCarthy, the author behind books like No Country For Old Men and The Road—his first produced original screenplay.

The movie stars Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem (complete with his new crazy hair), Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Dean Norris, Rosie Perez, John Leguizamo, Natalie Dormer, and Goran Visnjic. It tells the story of a lawyer (Fassbender), who gets in way over his head when he becomes involved in the dangerous world of drug trafficking.

You can check out the first trailer for The Counselor, which will be released on October 25th and is dedicated to Ridley’s late brother, Tony Scott, below now.

It’s a bit difficult to address the issue of the status of Top Gun 2 without being reminded of the tragic suicide of Tony Scott. In the days after the director took his own life, many of the projects that he was developing came to a halt, but Paramount was still deciding whether or not it would be proper to continue on without the director who brought the first film to the big screen. There is also the issue of the post-3D conversion of the film that was suppose to hit theaters later on next year.

Now the New York Times is reporting that Top Gun 2 has stalled and it’s not likely that production for the sequel will move forward. The report didn’t provide any details as to how Paramount came to this decision, but it looks as if the studio did not want to appear to be insensitive to the Scott family by replacing Tony with another director.

We at Geeks of Doom and everyone around the cinema community and the globe are still stunned by the news last week that film director Tony Scott, responsible for so many of the fun, in your face action films of the 1980s and beyond, jumped to his death off of a bridge at the age of 68.

Certainly this is a story that no one anticipated coming, and for sure there will be question marks that will go unanswered forever. Why this vibrant, talented, vivid, energetic and colorful individual would commit such an act is harrowing, tragic, and ultimately extremely sad (there is speculation about this health, but no official word yet). Klieg lights have been snuffed in Hollywood metaphorically from this event, and the legacy of Tony Scott will always endure and hopefully shine even brighter than it did when he was with us.

In memoriam of the man, it’s very, very easy to be forgiving and forgetful when an artist like Scott passes away, and in the quick emotional haze of these kind of events, it’s very easy to suddenly give the deceased artist a free pass of his entire body of work. But, in all fairness and honesty, and that’s the only way this reporter can give it to you folks, there’s no denying that the body of cinematic work that Tony Scott produced in his lifetime were equally loved, hated, critically panned, enjoyed by movie goers and critics, they sported huge box office returns, they sported huge box office failures, this kind of list can go on and on.

Skull-Face Island Movie Podcast presented by Geeks Of Doom
Episode 05: ParaNorman Osborn

Rum. Curaçao liqueur. Lime juice. That, my friends, is a Mai Tai – a delicious cocktail I’ve been enjoying down by the beach for the past couple of days. Hello folks, it’s Adam Frazier aka FamousMonster and I’m currently listening to Stephen King audiobooks while sipping from an bottomless pitcher of Mai Tai.

Tim Grant is busying carving a canoe out of a single solitary piece of wood and David Allen is down by the lagoon painting watercolors and waxing poetic on the brilliance of James Gunn’s Slither to the natives.

If you missed our previous transmissions, let me explain how this works. In the year 1991, US Flight 1313 experienced a mysterious, magnetic anomaly somewhere over the South Pacific. Engines failed, pilots cursed and prayed to their Gods, and three boys (that’s us!) washed ashore on Skull-Face Island, which of course is an ISLAND in the SHAPE of a SKULL! How cool is that!?

Last Sunday millions of people around the world where stunned when the news broke that Tony Scott, big time Hollywood director and younger brother of Ridley Scott, had committed suicide for reasons yet to be explained. You can read Empress Eve’s wonderful obituary of the late filmmaker here. Although Scott’s movies were never granted the often unfettered adulation critics and cinéastes willingly gave his brother, he was responsible for some of the coolest and most popular modern Hollywood action films. After scoring two back-to-back blockbusters with Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II, Scott started to make the more interesting movies that would come to define his later years as a director. Some of them were smash hits, but rarely scaled the heights as his earlier career-making successes, and several of them were box office flops that later found new life on home video and cable.

Submitted for your approval are the five films I believe in my heart of hearts to be the essentials of Tony Scott’s unusual but beloved and rewarding filmography. If your knowledge of the man’s work doesn’t extend beyond his ability to make Tom Cruise look good in the cockpit of a fighter jet and the front seat of a battered stock car then you might find this list worth a read.