Reality: Sidney Crosby skates down the left wall into Flyers territory, banks the puck off the far corner to Gonchar who fires one from the blue line right past Marty Biron!

VS Commentary: Sidney Crosby has really been facing a lot of adversity as of late. Mainly because they say he's a diver and a winer. There may be some truth to that based off of the reports we received from the Flyers bench. The Penguins scored.

Reality: Malkin is coming off the bench for the penalty kill, when Marion Hossa sends him a two-line pass into the Flyer's zone. Malkin, all alone on the breakaway skates up to Biron and fires a blistering slapshot eight feet from the goal!

VS Commentary: You know what's funny about Mike Richards? He's good friends with Mike Modano from the Dallas Stars. Both of those guys are named Mike, but with very different last names. It's amazing that people from such different families can still be friends. And the Dallas Stars used to be called the Northstars when they were in Minnesota. I guess when they moved south, they had to drop the "north!" The Penguins scored again.

Reality: After copious amounts of trash talk exchanged prior to faceoff, Tyler Kennedy and Scottie Upshall decide to drop the gloves and fight. Kennedy is like a wild ferret, throwing punches left and right. The fight is so ferocious that the second the two players fall to the ice, they spring back up and keep at it. Eventually, they tire and are escorted to the penalty box for 5 minutes each.

VS Commentary: You're watching the NHL on Versus in high definition! Make sure you tune in tomorrow night for the next match in the Detroit and Dallas series. Boy, is that a great series or what? I mean, both teams are evenly matched, and neither are as cocky as those Penguins. Don't you just hate that the Penguins are so good? Man... talk about excessive excellence. Oh well, at least the two teams in this Eastern Conference Final come from towns with great signature sandwiches. I'm talking about, of course, the Philly Cheesesteak and the Pittsburgh ham sandwich. That's it, right? The ham sandwich? We go now to a bar in Philadelphia, where fans are cheering for some reason! Did something just happen on the ice?

Reality: The shot clock is winding down, and the Rangers have pulled their goalie. The blueshirts are trying to set something up in the Penguins' zone, but the puck is stolen by Jordan Staal! He skates it into the neutral zone and shoots is calmly into the Ranger's net for his second empty-net goal of the playoffs.

VS Commentary: This VS broadcast has been brought to you by Amp'd Energy drink. From all of us here at the VS Network, we're really glad you found us and were able to tune in. Thanks a whole lot. Seriously, that's really great of you for sticking around. Get it? I sticking around? Eh? Eh? The game is over now, and I think the score changed at the end.

Posted by Mike Rubino at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been watching a fair amount of small, largely forgotten, sci-fi films thanks to the kinda-like-Netflix Blockbuster program. The most recent of which is Sean Connery's 1981 film Outland. The film is a blatant rip-off (or you may argue "homage") of the classic Gary Cooper film High Noon. It was this notion that first peaked my interest in the movie after a friend recommended it simply by saying "It's High Noon in space!"

This statement is partially true, but the film has little of the respectability or pacing of High Noon; because this is a sci-fi film, they have to first establish all of the rules of the setting/time before launching into the classic "last man remaining" storyline of the classic Western. Lucky for the film, they were able to just move into the leftover sets from the 1979 film Alien. Oh, and they were able to use the space suits. And the art director. And every other bloody idea aside from the actual alien itself. It's clear the movie was trying to capitalize on the new slow-paced, sterile space station flick that Ridley Scott pioneered two years prior; and while Western storylines are largely universal and can be translated into a number of other genres, I don't know if I would have set it in the claustrophobic world of Alien.

Outland borrows even further from Alien with its promotional tagline. Alien's tagline is "In space, no one can hear you scream." Outland's is "Even in space, the ultimate enemy is man." Aside from the fact that their tagline is inferior in its bulkiness, it also tells me that Outland thinks man is the ultimate enemy on Earth. That's pretty presumptuous, Outland. Perhaps the film would have been better served with a tagline like "Mining Jupiter's Moon Can Be Just as Dangerous as Earth Mines," "Sean Connery's still trying," or "Hey, It's High Noon in space."

The film has some good qualities to it... like lots of exploding heads. Sure, the fact that people's heads explode because of bad scientific logic, but who's counting? There's also a pretty good score by Jerry Goldsmith, who did the music for Planet of the Apes, amongst other things. And let's not forget Peter Boyle as the greedy mining boss.

The only remaining question I have about the film is this: why is Sean Connery the only one up there with an accent? Everyone else on Jupiter's Moon is American, and then here comes this Scottish marshal. No wonder no one respected the guy.

Posted by Mike Rubino at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)