Z/Web

Odd Japanese animation that’s apparently a TV series. I liked the concept: bounty hunters are searching everywhere for Vash the Terrible who has a $60,000,000,000 reward on his head (dead or alive) and it turns out Vash is really an idiot who’s just lucky. Or is he? The series does a great job keeping you from knowing the truth: is he just insanely lucky or extremely skillful? For instance, he’ll walk into a room full of bandits armed with missiles and machine guns and he’ll walk out unharmed, all the bandits destroyed. A lot of the humor of the series doesn’t translate well, and speaking of translation, what is the deal with Japanese films and subtitling and dubbing? The dub track is completely different from the subtitle track: I mean completely different. One will used the word “worried” and the other “care.” Huh? Quite disconcerting.

A boring first half led to chances in the second, but still no scoring. On penalty kicks, Real Espana’s Hector Gutierrez missed his kick, and all five Galaxy shooters made theirs, with Sasha Victorine scoring the winner, so LA faces DC in the semifinal.

DC lead early with a goal from Talley, but Alajuelense came back halfway through the second half with one of their own. It looked like we were going to penalty kicks. Then, in something you just can’t script, Ben Olsen came through with a header in injury time to give DC the win and advance to the semis.