Breaking Down a Miracle on Ice Movie: Nobody is Prepared for This

The next segment of the movie begins in a fascinating fashion with Herb staring at a bulletin board with his players’ names and faces written on index cards. I guess he’s making the final decisions about who is going to Lake Placid and who is going home, but it is also possible that he is just being an evil genius like the Grinch:

Literally a second later (because this movie was written by someone with severe attention issues, obviously) the scene shifts to a good luck and farewell party for our Olympic hockey players, as we see a banner wishing them the best in Lake Placid getting strung up on a wall. There is some miscellaneous chatter and laughter before OC knocks on the door to make his grand entrance.

OC hobbles in on crutches, and it’s kind of weird since we didn’t get to see the Madison Square Garden game where he got injured, but I suppose that spares us the agony of seeing these actors attempt to play hockey, so I won’t even complain about that. Instead, I’ll just comment on how it deviates from the timeline in a non-judgmental way, since this blog is a safe space for everyone, even incompetent directors.

Cox, who opened the door to admit OC, demands in the timelessly sympathetic manner of hockey players everywhere, “What happened?” In case, you’re wondering people in the hockey world aren’t traditionally very understanding about injuries, probably because hockey is the only pro sport where the team is literally down a man and can’t bring in a replacement if someone leaves mid-game owing to an injury. Basically, in hockey, it’s your fault you got hurt, and you’re probably exaggerating your injury like the total diver and wimp you are, so buck up and play, partner, unless you’re in a coma or something. If you doubt me on this and think I’m just making this stuff up to meet a word count, you can read about it in Ken Dryden’s consensus best hockey book ever entitled the Game, which is highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand how crazy goaltenders are and what it was like to be part of the Montreal Canadiens’ dynasty in the ‘70s.

OC says something sarcastic about how he fell down in the bathtub, and Dave Christian comes over not so much to help OC into a chair but to pepper him with questions about when he will return in the customary method of shaming the walking wounded back into playing on one leg if necessary. Once the besieged OC explains that he doesn’t know whether he’ll be able to play and Doc apparently doesn’t know about his injury, he settles into a chair with no thanks to the socially-impaired Dave.

Eventually, some members of the team overcome their years of hockey training in callous indifference to injuries, as they finally, in their words, realize, “Jack is hurt!” Someone also shouts out the bright idea of getting something for Jack’s foot. Ken Morrow grabs a seat to prop up OC’s leg, but Dictator Dave waves him off, ruling that “a pillow is good.” Of course it is; anything more than a pillow might make OC soft like a European or something.

OC says that a pillow is fine, but shows the slippery slope of an injury leading to softness by making the unreasonable request for another one.

Dave hands the crutches over to Ken Morrow and then asks if OC would like a drink. Patting his stomach, OC responds that he’d like a drink.

While everyone is finally attending to OC, Herb is back in his office, agonizing over what we can only presume are the final cuts. If that’s the case, I give everybody reading this blog fair warning that:

As I’m gathering up my pillows and Puffs, Herb removes some more index cards from his board and takes a sip of coffee. At least I assume its coffee. It could be something stronger, since Herb might be feeling:

Since our ADD director can’t focus on any scene for more than two seconds, we’re back at the party, where Jim and Silky are arriving in all their splendor. This is turning into quite the powwow.

Proving he may be the only guy on the team with a normal range of emotions, Jim comes over to ask OC how he is doing. Meanwhile, Ken Morrow is over at the drinks table, taking a sip of the cocktail that he spits back out like a total backwoods buffoon.

“Hey, Cox, what is this stuff, huh?” Ken demands. “Super or unleaded?”

“Cranberry juice and beer,” answers Cox as if this were a completely normal mix. Not a single hockey player has ever received any socialization whatsoever in this movie. Then Cox puts on this frankly psychopathic smile and adds, “Great color, huh?”

At this rate, next thing we know one of these guys will be drinking bourbon from a stranger’s shoe on a dare. Please be prepared to cover your eyes at a moment’s notice if you’re sensitive to reading about such inebriated exploits.

Putting down the punch with an eye roll, Ken remarks facetiously, “Terrific.”

Back in his den of doom, Herb is tinkering with the roster, and I hope I still have time to get ready for the final cuts, because:

The phone rings, and Herb barks into the receiver, “Yeah?” Gosh, Herb, you are so impolite. Didn’t anyone teach you how to answer a phone properly? Obviously not, because that’s not how you do it.

Moving along with another of the movie’s one-sided phone conversations that serve as info dumps and plot devices, Herb says, “Oh, hello, Keminsky…Yeah, yeah, I’m down to the final twenty…In the end, it wasn’t much choice who to cut…You’re right. The Russians are the last game we play before Lake Placid, so I might as well go along with my final choices…Yeah, bye.”

Okay, this phone conversation confirms that Herb is indeed making his final roster cuts. More importantly, though, it tells us that this party with a hurt OC takes place before the Madison Square Garden game against the Red Army team. That means this movie has OC getting injured at some other time. Weird. Maybe he got into a bar fight or something. This film drives me a bit crazy. Every time I give the director and script writer some credit for logic, the whole movie nose-dives gleefully back into lunacy. Ick. Perhaps everybody was intoxicated from cranberry juice and beer cocktails when working on this project. That’s about the only sane explanation for all these nonsensical plot decisions.

Herb hangs up on Keminsky and glances at the bulletin board one final time before the scene shifts back to the raging party with the beer and cranberry juice punch, where Rizzo has just entered to exuberant greetings from his celebrating teammates.

As Rizzo shuts the door, OC calls for him to come over to the chair. Holding his arm out like Adam reaching for God on the Sistine Chapel, OC implores, “Come here! Come here! Quick, Rizzie! Give me your hand!”

When Rizzo hurries over because the poor dude sounds like he is a dying man in need of a priest, OC snatches his hand and places it on his forehead. Rising after a second, he proclaims with exaggerated excitement, “It’s working. Oh, I can walk. I can walk.” Everyone realizes that they’re a victim of a classic OC prank or else Rizzo is Jesus Cat in disguise:

In all seriousness, we obviously learn here that OC wasn’t injured and just pretending to be to scare the daylights out of his teammates. While it’s nice to see OC’s playfully malicious personality on display in this film (especially since OC’s personality is one of the few things this movie gets right, so the director and script writers should play it to the hilt), I find this decision to have OC pretend to be hurt kind of ill-advised. It’s clumsy foreshadowing that actually removes some of the drama from the impending and real injury that OC is going to suffer at Madison Square Garden and makes it almost seem like poetic justice that OC got really hurt just to learn that injuries aren’t joking matters.

To explore what I mean and have an excuse to mention (because any blog post is ten times better with them) Steve Yzerman (who has only gotten more handsome with age, especially when he gives one of his rare grins that show off his crow’s feet) and Steven Stamkos (who is probably the happiest person ever to play pro hockey), let’s use a modern comparison from Team Canada 2014. Putting on our imagination hats instead of our thinking caps, let’s pretend that someone was going to do a movie on Team Canada’s path to gold in Sochi, and that brain trust decided to have Stamkos hobble, clutching his leg, into Yzerman’s office in Tampa sometime in late October, so we can have the following dramatic exchange:

Stamkos: Ouch, my leg! I’ve never been in pain like this before, not even when I took that slapshot to the face during that playoff series against Boston.

Yzerman: What did you do to yourself?

Stamkos: I didn’t do it! The goalpost I crashed into did. No need to sound so accusing.

Yzerman: You crashed into a goalpost? How stupid are you? They don’t move, you know.

Stamkos: Not true. The goalpost moved, but just not as much as my leg did. My leg got all twisted like Gumby’s. It was kind of gross to watch.

Yzerman: Well, back when I played, the goalposts didn’t move around so much, so we knew better than to collide with them like bumper cars.

Stamkos: Back when you played, some guys didn’t wear helmets.

Yzerman: Only at the dawn of my storied NHL career. Anyway, how long will it take your leg to heal?

Stamkos: I don’t know. Probably a couple of months or a full season. I haven’t spoken to the doctors yet.

Yzerman: Why the heck not? Why didn’t you go to the trained medical professionals first instead of to me?

Stamkos: Because they would have seen instantly that I was pulling their legs, and that wouldn’t be a very funny prank.

Yzerman: I can’t believe that you’re getting an average annual salary of 7.5 million dollars, and you think this is an appropriate use of your time. Why don’t you get lost and do something useful like practicing your face-offs? Your face-off percentage stats are just ghastly, but you still insist on calling yourself a center.

Then, in early November, this happens in Boston Garden:

As an audience, of course, we’d feel sorry that Steven Stamkos, one of the few Canadians in the NHL who shows an actual personality beyond clichés in interviews on a regular basis, went down with a freak accident to his tibia during an Olympic year, but we’d also wonder why the directors took away some of the drama with such dumb foreshadowing and why they made Stamkos seem like such a jerk with a cavalier attitude to injuries. Fortunately, in the real world, this didn’t happen, so we could all feel weepy when Stamkos couldn’t go to the Olympics and babble on about how nobody had ever wished anything bad on Stamkos since he’s a guy everyone in the hockey world loves. Literally, I’m not exaggerating when I say everyone loves the dude, because Chara, the Big Bad Wolf defenseman, actually sent him a text wishing him well after his tibia surgery, and Claude Julien came by to visit him in the hospital (probably to assure him that if he signed with the Bruins as an unrestricted free agent, the offending goalpost could be removed from the Garden).

Anyhow, now that I’ve used a contemporary comparison to demonstrate how awful the scriptwriting and directing in this film is when it comes to robbing emotions from what should be key dramatic points of the movie, I apologize for dragging the two Stevens from Tampa into this mess, but I’m confident with sufficient therapy, they should make a full recovery and go back to being their well-adjusted selves, so moving along with the film, OC dances around, proclaiming how healed he is. Then the phone rings, and it’s about as menacing as that scene from Killer in the House:

Rizzo picks up the phone and answers somewhat correctly by saying, “Hello.” The partiers continue to make a ton of noise around him, so he covers the mouthpiece and asks, “Would you guys keep it down?”

When nobody responds to this request and everyone keeps talking at the top of their voices, Rizzo hollers, “Will everybody shut up please? It’s Herb.” Maybe somebody should teach Rizzo that adding “please” doesn’t make “shut up” polite any more than prefacing a statement that someone looks like a killer whale with “no offense” makes it sensitive.

Since the mention of Herb is enough to silence everybody, Rizzo talks into the mouthpiece again, saying, “Yeah, Herb. Uh, yeah, yeah, they are. Just a minute.” Someone should explain to these scriptwriters that not every piece of dialogue has to include one or two “yeah.” It’s getting grating to hear, honestly.

Rizzo calls over his shoulder, “Cox! It’s for you.”

Cox wends his way over to the phone, which he takes from Rizzo, saying in a shaky voice, “Hi…I think I know what it’s about, Herb. There’s no need to come to your office…I understand…Yeah…Thanks for everything…Yep…Good luck to you, too…I mean it; you’re gonna win the gold, Herb…Sure, hang on.”

That was probably one of the most awkward phone conversations in Olympic hockey history right up there with that time Steve Yzerman had to call Marty St. Louis to warn him that he didn’t make the 2014 Team Canada roster, and Marty began a tantrum that lasted months by demanding a trade. Seriously, Marty St. Louis is the whiniest Olympian in hockey history, because he is a brat who continues to cry incessantly even when he gets whatever he wants, and I spent the whole Olympics hoping Babcock would punch him in the face and exclaim, “Sorry. Didn’t see you there, because you’re just so small.”

Oh, look, I’m digressing again. What’s really important here is that Ralph Cox, an amateur athlete who will never have the accolades that Marty St. Louis does, handled the cut with maturity and was even able to wish Herb well even though he had to be in a ton of emotional pain. Way to go, Cox! You’re a winner who deserves a round of tearful applause, so here you go, pal:

Cox passes the phone to Hughes, who takes it and says, “Yeah, Herb…Yeah, I’ll be right over.” Then Hughes hangs up the phone, and my heart is all torn up, so:

All the boys look like kicked puppies, so I’m going to end this post here, so I can heal my bruised heart before moving onto the next section.

Breaking Down a Miracle on Ice Movie: Looking for Lake Placid

After bidding a sad adieu to Les Auge (whose humorous presence will be missed in this film), the action moves to the team bus traveling down a mostly deserted, dark highway at night. The camera pans in on Coach Patrick and Herb snoozing in the front row, and it’s good to see Herb doing something as normal and non-confrontational as sleeping. Perhaps it will lower his blood pressure.

As the bus moves along, Pav’s guitar strums the tune to Simon and Garfunkel’s classic tune about the New Jersey turnpike and its endless bumper-to-bumper traffic jams, and he sings us “America” in a melancholic voice:

Once Pav finishes his singing, Jim notes to Rizzo, who is sitting next to him, “I’m just looking for one small town in America, Lake Placid.” That must have been harder to do before the days of Google Maps, so that’s quite a quest.

Rizzo responds playfully, “Lake Placid? I’ve never heard of it. Don’t worry, Jimmy. If it’s got less than ten thousand people, Brooks has got it on the schedule.”

The guy behind Jim whose face I can’t read well in the dark bus (so I don’t know who he is, basically), comments, “I personally don’t think the place exists. Probably just Brooks’ way of getting a hockey team together.” I think he should adjust his tin foil hat because the conspiracy theory reception isn’t too good, but he’d probably just assure me:

The person behind Rizzo puts in, “You know what I think? We all died and went to hockey players’ hell.” Nah, hockey players’ hell wasn’t invented until John Tortorella (who really should have an award for the biggest coaching meltdown given in his honor, or, really, disgrace each year) began his NHL coaching career. For proof of what I mean, check out this charming video of Tortorella roasting his players alive:

Remember that’s what Tortorella does in front of rolling cameras. He’s probably even more of a Grade A jerk in private, but moving along from Tortorella’s Broadway productions because he’s now been fired by two different NHL franchises in two consecutive seasons which makes him not particularly relevant to the hockey world anymore (thank you, hockey gods), let’s get back to our 1980 adventure.

Some teammate from the front of the bus, shouts over his shoulder, “Hey, will you guys shut up? Some civilized people up front want to get some sleep.” Come on, man. A team bus is meant to be loud, so that tells the audience:

At this point, Jim decides to open up and start relating his whole life story to Pav, saying, “You know, when I was a kid, I never slept. Not a lot. Used to get up at four o’clock in the morning to play hockey. My mother would be in the kitchen fixing breakfast. She was healthy then. Anyway, I used to play with the older guys on the pond. My kid brother plays there now. The older guys had cars, so I’d slip downstairs and stay near the heater to keep warm and close to the door so I could hear the horn of the car. It really felt good being the youngest allowed to play.” This is cute, because I know that Jim liked to slip his mother notes in the morning and stuff.

Pav points out, “Except they made you play in net.” Ha. That’s funny because my brother is a goalie, but I’ve always said that the only reason he became one was for the masks. Goalies get to customize their masks, which I suspect is one of those bones the hockey community threw them because otherwise no one would be willing to take that awful job. (If you’re the goalie, you can make thirty saves and still get booed for the one you miss, and also you wear so much protective equipment that if you want to hug a teammate you risk suffocating him; goalie fights are like two men attempting to dance with beach balls glued all over their bodies). Basically, the thing is, if you weren’t a very odd person before you became a goalie, you would be after a few seasons of it, and it shows. Some of those goalie masks look like creations serial killers would make out of their victims (looking at you, Carey Price). Some look like the ultimate foray into geekdom (Kari Lehtonen! Peter Budaj!). I love that every goalie’s psyche is right out there on display. (And, in the case of the one that looks like brains: way to take that literally.) Gives you something to analyze during breaks in the action.

“Nah,” Jim answers. “That was just when I was in high school. They supplied the goalie’s equipment. Besides, my mother figured that goal was the safest place.” That’s odd. I thought Jimmy was pretty much always a goaltender even when he played pond hockey as a kid, because I remember him saying somewhere that he wanted to play but didn’t understand all the rules, so being a goalie was simple since all he had to do was keep the puck out of the net. I’m going to trust my memory more than this film. In short, movie:

Speaking of playing with older guys, Bah remarks, “When I was a freshman I played for Duluth against the ’76 squad. Man, I thought those guys were ten feet tall.”

“Hey, Bah,” Buzz teases, “tell them how you scored the winning goal against us in overtime.” That sounds like a cool moment. Was it as awesome as TJ Oshie’s shootout goal against Russia?

“Yeah, hare-brain,” retorts Bah, “for the four-hundred and seventy-fifth time.” Everyone laughs uproariously, as Bah continues, “Migraine headache number two.”

“What’s number one?” shouts somebody from the front of the bus (and the poor lighting in this scene is driving me nuts, because it makes it even harder to identify characters who all look the same).

Being all sociable for once, Jimmy jokes, “ ‘Where’s Brooks? O’Callahan’s looking for him.’” That’s actually pretty funny, because it gives me a mental image of OC going after Herb like Roy going after Perry in this hilarious gif:

Now I just wish the movie would show Herb and O’Callahan at each other’s throats. That would be better than ten million renditions of Herb giving Rizzo and Jimmy a hard time. Oh, well, we can’t have everything we want in life, so moving along with the film, Rizzo decides to end the fun by warning, “Hey, you guys better take it easy. He’ll hear you. Let’s get some sleep.” Then Rizzo curls up in his chair like a total baby, and the bus rolls along.

Not actually going to sleep, Rizzo tells Jimmy in a quiet voice, “Hey, Jimmy. All that stuff is behind you now. Got to think to the future.” Okay, Rizzo, I realize you were just trying to be sympathetic there, but you sound like a total moron, since that’s not how the stages of grief work. The stages of grief are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and freaking denial and anger again. Okay, I invented the last bit to make a point, but hear me out. Grief is a process. You don’t get over losing your mother the same way you move beyond losing a sock (never a whole pair, of course) in the washing machine unless you are a sociopath.

“Future?” Jim asks. “Actually, I was thinking about my ma. I guess there’s a connection somewhere.” Of course there is. The connection is in Lake Placid, the place where we’re all looking for…

 

30 Favorites from 30 Different Teams: Jonathan Toews (Chicago Blackhawks)

NHL Franchise: Chicago Blackhawks

The not exactly politically correct and totally insulting to Native Americans logo for the Chicago Blackhawks that is even more proof than Subban spending most of the Olympics in the press box that hockey might be a little racist…

Favorite Player: Jonathan Toews (aka Captain Serious)

Jonathan Toews being all intense, since you don’t get the moniker Captain Serious by taking face-offs nonchalantly.

This season Jonathan Toews was nominated for the Selke Trophy for the best defensive forward in the NHL and for the Mark Messier Award for the best leader in the NHL. By anyone else’s standards, that’s an incredible season, but he’s probably disappointed in himself, because he didn’t win the Stanley Cup and a gold medal in the same year as a repeat of his feat in 2010, since Jonathan holds himself to inhuman standards of perfection.

Jonathan expresses his optimistic life philosophy.

It’s far beyond the scope of this post to touch on all the Jonathan Toews highlights of the 2013-2014 season, so I’ll just include some of my favorite moments for everyone to stare in awe at. During the Western Final series against the Kings, he buried a beautiful one-timer past Quick:

He was also a monster in the opening playoff series against the St. Louis Blues, going backhand on a breakaway to score the overtime winner against Ryan Miller in Game 5:

Apart from being a beast in the playoffs, Jonathan was a force to be reckoned with during the regular season even in the midst of a blizzard, as is apparent in this deke around the pylon Orpik that ends in a five-hole goal against Fleury:

Even on the penalty kill, Jonathan is a threat, as can be seen in this shorthanded goal he tallied against the Red Wings’ Jimmy Howard:

NHL success, of course, was only part of Jonathan’s hockey glory this year. He was named an alternate captain for Canada’s gold medal winning team in Sochi, and Sidney Crosby reportedly sought Jonathan’s approval before accepting the captaincy, which is such a hilariously Canadian thing to do that I also imagine him sending an apology crate of maple syrup as well. Apparently there were some Canadians (probably the two who missed the Stanley Cup Finals in 2010 and 2013) who questioned whether Jonathan deserved to be an alternate captain, since Coach Babcock felt the need to explain why Jonathan had been appointed to this position and basically spent a paragraph praising Jonathan for everything except the invention of the airplane. Jonathan responded to all this by scoring a golden goal (just like Sidney’s in 2010) against Sweden.

Jonathan being all clutch and scoring a gold medal winning goal in the Olympics, forcing anyone who doubted his ability to be an alternate captain to eat crow.

In his spare time, Jonathan found time to make a wish come true for a kid with cancer:

Off the ice, he engaged in an annual dance-off with Patrick Kane at the Blackhawks Convention (warning: there is a lot of screaming from girls in this video, so brace your eardrums for an assault):

Captain Serious knows how to dance, score, and lead, so how can he not be my favorite player?

Since he asked nicely and smiled beatifically, I guess we’ll have to honor his request for the remainder of the post, even though it won’t be fun…

30 Favorites from 30 Different Teams: Justin Faulk (Carolina Hurricanes)

NHL Franchise: Carolina Hurricanes

The Carolina Hurricanes logo, which does not use the traditional colors associated with hurricanes, and, as such, looks more like a random spiral than a hurricane. To think a group of people was probably paid thousands of dollars to devise this symbol…

Favorite Player: Justin Faulk

Justin warming up to be his awesome self during a pre-skate.

Justin Faulk is such an amazing defenseman that at the age of twenty-one he was the youngest Olympian for the men’s hockey team in Sochi, although he only played for a total of 9:12 in the final two games, because Bylsma insisted on giving Orpik every possible opportunity to make a fool of himself in Russia, and Orpik delivered in spades. Luckily, the Carolina Hurricanes actually let Justin play (indeed with an average ice time of 23:23, he was ranked second on his team in average time on ice for the 2013-2014 season), so we get to see how good he is when he is allowed on the ice. Justin took advantage of his time on ice to pot five goals, including this nifty one against the Dallas Stars:

In addition to the goals he scored, he assisted on twenty-seven more (this is easy to remember because it matches his jersey number), including this Hail Mary pass to set up Staal:

Justin also does not flinch from fights, as is clear in this tussle he engaged in with Joffrey Lupul:

Anyway, Justin had a great season with the Carolina Hurricanes, and it was a pity that he couldn’t show his talents more in Sochi, but it will be exciting to see where his career takes him next year, since he is an exciting young defenseman to watch.