Ridley Scott is kinda like Steven Spielberg or David Fincher in that he always seems to be orbiting a number of projects but only rarely sets down the skiffs. Commitment-phobic? Capricious? Overly ambitious? Hey, if it means we don’t get another G.I. Jane, take your sweet time deciding, Sir.

With his vino movie A Good Year in the bottle, Scott is fearlessly hovering over the Middle East hot zone for a pair of potential projects. One is at Warner Bros. with the near-porn title Penetration, based on the Scott Ignatius’ spy book about a CIA agent hunting a terrorist in Jordan (the Arab country, not the pneumatic UK pinup girl, which would be more fun).

The other (and possibly next) is Paramount’s The Invisible World, a straight-from-the-headlines story from Ignatius and Dana Stevens about a female journalist who gets abducted in Iraq. Scott must’ve acquired a taste for Tajine and couscous while filming Kingdom of Heaven in Morocco – he wants to return there to shoot this one as well.

I’ll leave the political commentary on the whole Middle East mess to Devin (that’s one of the reasons we let him out of the box for each day), and just say that I personally would rather see Scott would make another sci-fi film rather than another historical epic or topics I already see on the news any given night.