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We've had some time to get used to the truly terrible idea of a 3D Stretch Armstrong flick with Taylor (Team Jacob) Lautner as the flexible hero in question. But on the upside, at least now I can hold out hope that maybe if Lautner's busy getting all bendy, he won't have time to ruin the memory of Louden Swain in a remake of the sports/teen drama Vision Quest -- which brings me to today's Scenes (Songs) We Love, and while most people focus on Madonna's Crazy for You as the musical highlight of the flick, I thought I would offer up a pretty viable alternative: Lunatic Fringe from Red Rider.

Vision Quest was based on the novel by Terry Davis and centered on a high-school wrestler (played by Matthew Modine) who decides to take on the top dog in a fight to do something meaningful with his life -- which I guess means rolling around on the floor with other guys. But, in the pursuit of his dream, he sacrifices his health and his love life with an older woman (played by Linda Fiorentino).

The song was written by the Tom Cochrane (and I'm sure my fellow Canadians know that name), and was originally released in 1981 before making its way onto the soundtrack, and even though the song is actually about the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1970's, when I hear this tune I just think of Matthew Modine in a spot-lit gym.

After the jump: a slice of Canadiana...

Today we're bringing back some of our favorite Superbowl Sunday posts. Here's one from Scott Weinberg originally published in 2008.

Ah yes, Super Bowl Sunday. And the Philadelphia Eagles are not involved. Sigh. I suppose I can try to create some sort of vested interest (nice to see an NFC East team in the big game, plus "David & Goliath" is always fun to watch), but the truth is that I'm mostly looking forward to all the new movie commercials. Don't get me wrong; I freaking love (American-style) football, but the Super Bowl seems more like pre-packaged spectacle than an actual gridiron battle. (Give me an Eagles / Redskins game any day!) And so, logically, my thoughts turn to movie-land...

Ask someone to name a great baseball movie and you'll get nine different answers. Ask someone to name a great (American-style) football movie and you'll get nine puzzled expressions. But while the NFL waits for something as lyrical as a Natural or a Field of Dreams, there's definitely some solid football flicks out there. And by "football," I mean "not soccer."

Any Given Sunday (1999) -- It's garish and indulgent and more than a little scattershot, but Oliver Stone's pulpy exposé of the American Football Machine is pretty undeniably entertaining.

The Longest Yard (1974) -- Long before it became a flat vehicle for Adam Sandler and Chris Rock, The Longest Yard was a rough, tough, and admirably gritty prison/football flick from Robert Aldrich. Try watching the two flicks back-to-back and you'll plainly understand why (and how) most remakes suck.

Two professional basketball players were recently suspended for the remainder of the season by the NBA for brandishing firearms in the workplace. Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton got into serious trouble for their actions but, to their credit, at least they didn't start shooting each other on the court. Neither, by the way, do the players in the Thai action flick Fireball -- they just beat the crap out of each other.

Fireball, which was released on DVD last week, combines basketball with Thai boxing. Director Thanakorn Pongsuwan says that he wanted to try something different; setting the action on a basketball court serves two purposes. First, it enlarges the field of play for the martial arts action while still limiting it to a set stage. Second, pitting two teams of "players" against each other creates a dizzying array of battles to fill the screen. Thus, the tired premise of savage, underground duels to the death, controlled by shadowy criminal figures gambling large sums of money on the outcome, gets a fresh coat of blood paint.

Pongsuwan amps up the violence and films in such a way that it's often difficult to figure out what's going on. The quick cuts and crazy angles help cover up the extensive wire work. And the basketball is really incidental to the bashing and the kicking. Between the action scenes, though, we get to know the player / warriors on one team, and the plight of the characters adds some nice, if secondary drama to the fisticuffs.

Lest you think that product placement is limited to big-budget, big-star movies, be assured that independent filmmakers are not entirely adverse to the idea of exchanging screen time for financial or promotional support. Crooked Arrows, an independent sports film scheduled to begin production this spring, will be exclusively sponsored by Reebok, according to AdAge.com. Reebok will use the film as a springboard to promote its lines of lacrosse equipment and apparel. Owing to the early involvement of Reebok, the filmmakers have been able to "secure [the] bulk of their financing, and also guarantees distribution for a nationwide release of at least 250 theaters in 2011."

The official site for Crooked Arrows makes comparisons to "heroic team sports movies," such as Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, Mighty Ducks, and Miracle. The story follows a mixed-blood Native American who becomes the coach of his reservation's high school lacrosse team, competing against "the better equipped and better trained players of the elite Prep School League," per the synopsis. Steve Rash (Bring It On: All or Nothing, Road Trip: Beer Pong) will direct.

Jacques Vroom, marketing director for the film, pointed out: "Normally to raise money, you take a movie to festivals and pray someone picks it up for distribution. With independent movies, the reality is these deals are rare." It's a dilemma that's facing all the filmmakers coming to Sundance and Slamdance this week. Along with tremendous excitement, there's also the genuine concern that some very good films will never see the inside of a movie theater again, simply because, in a tightening market, only a few will be anointed with the oil of a distribution deal and thus (hopefully) recuperate some or all of the production cost.

After wowing the crowd at December's Butt-Numb-A-Thon (including our own John Gholson), the ultra-violent smart-ass superhero flick Kick-Ass is coming back to Austin for a more formal bow as the Opening Night Film of SXSW 2010 in mid-March.

The hype's only been exceedingly positive for Matthew Vaughn's comic-book adaptation, and Lionsgate was probably only willing to shell out a reported $50 million to distribute it if they thought they'd be making that much back and then some. Aaron Johnson (pictured), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Superbad), Chloë Grace Moretz (500 Days of Summer) and Nicolas Cage (The Wicker Man) star; the film opens proper on April 16th.

SXSW won't reveal its complete program for a few weeks yet, not until early February, but they did reveal a couple of additional titles:

There have been a couple of announcements from World Wrestling Entertainment regarding their latest film projects in the past few weeks. They've got The Marine 2 (starring Ted DiBiase Jr., wrestling son of "The Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase) hitting DVD, they're working on a horror/western origin movie for WWE veteran The Undertaker (a potentially so-bad-its-good film if I've ever heard one), and they're readying Knucklehead, a road comedy about mixed-martial arts starring Paul "The Big Show" Wight and Melora Hardin (with a plot that sounds an awful lot like Kingpin).

Nothing about that slate of releases gets me particularly excited as a movie fan. The WWE films at their best have only been compulsively watchable (The Condemned) and, at their worst, almost completely inept (See No Evil). The biggest loser in the whole WWE films pool of wrestling actors might be John Cena. He's got a natural charisma and energetic wit similar to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, but in his films Cena's been stifled into playing dull tough guy roles, never allowing an audience outside of wrestling to see why the WWE picked him to be their next break-out star in the first place.

I hope he gets that chance with WWE's next effort, the family drama Brother's Keeper. THR reports that the film will see John Cena as a former high school wrestling star, estranged from his mother (Patricia Clarkson) in the aftermath of his father's death. His teenage brother (Dexter's Devon Graye), with no talent at sports, takes up amateur wrestling as a way to re-connect the family. It sounds like a nice departure from Cena's run-and-gun action snoozefests, and I'm especially interested in seeing how Cena handles himself in the heavy drama scenes with Academy Award nominee Clarkson. Could this be the project the WWE has been waiting for --the movie that makes John Cena the next Rock?

It's the ninth inning, two outs and the bases are loaded. The famous starting pitcher has been sent to the showers. Brad Pitt is the catcher and is waiting on the mound with the manager, who is calling for the ace reliever to save the game. And his name is Bennett Miller.

Steven Soderbergh was three days from the start of filming on true-life underdog baseball flick Moneyball when he was unexpectedly yanked from the director's chair by Columbia Pictures head honcho Amy Pascal. She didn't like the latest script revisions, so Aaron Sorkin was hired to make sure Moneyball takes a more mainstream, less documentary approach than what Soderbergh evidently had in mind. To complete the task, Variety reports that Columbia is now ready to put the ball in the hands of experienced mainstream director Bennett Miller ... whoops, that's not right.

Miller may not be well-known, but he directed the critically-acclaimed, true-life Capote four years ago, so maybe the studio feels that he has an affinity for the genre. Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Academy Award for his performance in that film, and Miller was nominated, so, again, that speaks to his ability to work with actors. Capote was a very good picture, in part because Miller took a measured, low-key approach. Will that work with Moneyball? In the best of all possible worlds for Columbia, Moneyball, based on a non-fiction sports book by Michael Lewis, will follow the audience-pleasing, financial successful path of another movie based on a non-fiction sports book by Michael Lewis: The Blind Side.

If you held out faint hope that Hugh Jackman wouldn't be helping Shawn Levy box robots, and would abandon it for a feature film adaptation of A Steady Rain, kiss it goodbye now. Variety reports that DreamWorks' Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider have green-lit Real Steel, making it the studio's first big financial project since it split with Paramount, and had to find its own money.

Spielberg was attached to the project as executive producer when it was first announced, and it seems that it's been a real passion project for him. DreamWorks bought the project back in 2005, and it was one of the films they held onto after splitting from Paramount. "When we took it with us, we really highlighted it as something we would put the pedal to metal on," said DreamWorks co-president of production Mark Sourian. "It's a project that Steven always wanted to do. It just came together rapidly after we left Paramount." The film will be made for the relatively low budget of $80 million, and will begin production next June.

With a low budget to avoid Transformers excess, perhaps the magic of Spielberg and Richard Matheson can overcome the kiddie tendencies of Shawn Levy, and turn it into something special. A lot of commenters mentioned that Matheson's story was adapted into an episode of the Twilight Zone called Steel. Happily, it's online and I've embedded it below the jump. It really is a good episode, and while Levy keeps stressing that his Real Steel is grounded in its "father-son relationship," I hope it can retain a bit of Matheson's grit. I could be happy with a robot version of Million Dollar Baby.