Captain America: The Musical

OK, I'll admit it: Back in the day, when these cheesy cartoons with Marvel Comics superheroes aired in New Orleans on a weekday afternoon children's show -- Cap Canaveral, if memory serves me correctly -- I thought they were pretty freakin' dreadful. Even as a 12-year-old, I could tell that pennies had been pinched, corners had been cut, and the animation left something to be desired. (Something like, oh, I dunno, maybe real animation.) And yet I felt compelled to watch. Why? Well, I was a big Marvel fan at the time. And, yeah, there was something about the theme song for the Captain America cartoons...


And the Spider-Man theme was so endearingly and enduringly neat, it was reprised -- briefly -- by a street musician in the movie Spider-Man 2.



But really, there's never been any excuse for that.

'Metal Men' movie

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: Not another comic book movie! But I must confess to having very fond memories of Metal Men, an obscure DC Comic of the '60s that evidently has acquired a fervent cult following. It's been years -- well, OK, decades -- since I've glanced at an issue. But I remember the robotic heroes as being among the very few DC characters of the time who seemed as complex and compelling as the dysfunctional superheroes in Marvel titles. So the prospect of a film version strikes me as, at the very least, promising. I mean, how could you not look forward to a movie that may feature the sexiest fembot since Maria of Metropolis?

How low (budget) can you go?

The love and talented Christy Lemire talks to the makers of five ultra-low-budget movies -- including two of my faves from last year, Mike Akel's Chalk and Arin Crumley and Susan Buice's Four Eyed Monsters -- that are nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at this year's Spirit Awards. Among the revelations: Akel and Crumley, who based their movie on their real-life relationship, admit that blending fact and fiction meant the stress didn't stop when they switched off the vidcam. Says Crumley: "[W]e're in a relationship making a movie about the relationship and living together and using the space where we live as the set, so basically we didn't have a place to live.

"In the scenes where we're bummed out or going crazy or losing our minds, that's us losing our minds."

Speaking of the Spirit Awards -- which will be handed out Feb. 24 -- I've still got my fingers crossed for Michael Kang's The Motel in the Best First Feature category. And no, not just because I'm an old school Marvel Comics fan. On the other hand, yes, getting to title a blog post "Kang the Conqueror" would be pretty neat.