Thin Ice

THE CLEVER little thriller "Thin Ice" has drawn comparisons to "Fargo," I guess because there's snow and crime and Midwesterners. But there's more in the woodchipper here than just Coen-style subzero noir - some of the small-town moral introspection of "Win Win," the offbeat, off-the-interstate comedy of "Cedar Rapids. " There are other flavors, too, best left to the viewer to discover, but what they all add up to is something fun and fit for the slushy season. A well-cast Greg Kinnear stars in "Thin Ice" as a slippery insurance agent whose elastic ethics are further stretched by financial trouble.

Flyers coach Paul Holmgren made it plain to his players in a meeting a few days ago. Yesterday, he went public: Several Flyers are playing for more than a playoff berth right now. They are playing for their careers. "If we don't make the playoffs, (for) a lot of these guys, it'll be two years in a row that they missed the playoffs. You would have to assume there'd be a lot of changes next year, and some guys that were on both teams might not be in the league next year. I think that's motivation enough," Holmgren said after the Flyers slogged through a 6-2 loss to the Buffalo Sabres, their eighth loss in 10 games.

Nobody else will say it, so Brian Boucher did. In a game when the Flyers' former rookie goaltending sensation made several big stops, but looked terrible on the one chance that defined the outcome, Boucher acknowledged he now has little chance of reclaiming his job from Roman Cechmanek. After a 4-3 loss to the Boston Bruins left Boucher 1-4-2 in the Bill Barber era, which is nearly two months old, Boucher was asked about the difficulty of playing here and there, never getting to put two or three starts together.

Teams are expected to improve during the qualifying phase of the world championships, or so the theory goes. Team Canada, much like the United States, has played unevenly and without marked improvement through two rounds. Yesterday's hairy 2-1 victory over lowly Ukraine, which ended the qualifying round, doesn't bode well as Canada moves into the quarterfinal (elimination) round. "I'm sure it's not where everybody thought we'd be," goalie Martin Brodeur said. " . . . Hopefully, the suicide game will be good for us. A lot of times it brings out the best in players.

Flyers president Jay Snider reportedly told Gov. Casey and Mayor Goode yesterday that he feared the city would be unable to hold up its end of the agreement on a new arena if it went into bankruptcy. During a meeting in the governor's mansion, a source said, Snider expressed a desire to keep his hockey team in Philadelphia. But uncertainty over the ability to enforce contracts in a bankruptcy situation was forcing him to keep open the option of moving the NHL team across the river to Camden.

ON GOLDEN POND. 9 p.m. Sunday, Channel 3. There's no business like the packaged-spontaneity business. Call it reality, or "unscripted drama," or merely a game-show revival, but TV that offers the possibility of surprise is the hottest thing on the menu right now for a country weary of canned laughter and pre-chewed pathos. And yet like blackened redfish, most of what happens on these shows only looks like an accident. In between the lightning-quick rounds of NBC's "Weakest Link," host Anne Robinson sometimes huddles with producers for 10 or 15 minutes, according to one recent contestant, giving her plenty of time to hone the trademark insults that appear to sail right off the top of her unsmiling head.

Bad ice. Sounds like the name of a rock group. But last night "bad ice" described the playing surface for the Rangers-Flyers game at Madison Square Garden. The opening faceoff was delayed 15 minutes and the game was put on hold several times as the ice was patched in two places. With the white paint that covers the three-quarter-inch ice scraped clear, the concrete floor was visible. How can a game be played on such a bad surface in one of the NHL's marquee buildings? Madison Square Garden, after all, is not some poorly equipped high school arena in northern Maine.

As Tullytown Police Officer Pat Priore swam to shore clutching a boy he had saved from drowning in an ice-encrusted lake, his strength ebbed, and he prayed for help. That help came in the form of Priore's lifelong friend and co-worker, Howard Bennett, a 250-pound bear of a policeman. Bennett, who forged through chest-high water, grabbed the boy from Priore and handed him to someone before plucking Priore from beneath the surface of Levittown Lake on Monday. "I'm a Bible-reading Christian," said Priore, 28, waving a cast-encased right hand at Bennett - the cast a result of breaking the ice to get to the boy. "And when I saw Howard, I knew God had sent the right person.

The toughest hockey games Cammi Granato played were never on the ice, but on the concrete floor of the basement in her suburban Chicago home. "Hockey was our life growing up," Granato said. "To the four of us who were about the same age, three older brothers and myself, it was this obsession. Everything was hockey. " Every school composition was about hockey. Every moment at the dinner table was spent shooting pennies back and forth. Every pair of jeans was torn at the knees from living-room games played with a rolled-up sock.

Manufacturing activity in the Philadelphia area contracted in March for the fourth consecutive month, and a separate set of economic indicators for future activity from the Conference Board weakened for the fifth month in a row. Both of yesterday's reports - one regional and one national - reinforced the perception of an economy skating on thin ice despite repeated actions by the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates and calm turmoil in the...

THE CLEVER little thriller "Thin Ice" has drawn comparisons to "Fargo," I guess because there's snow and crime and Midwesterners. But there's more in the woodchipper here than just Coen-style subzero noir - some of the small-town moral introspection of "Win Win," the offbeat, off-the-interstate comedy of "Cedar Rapids. " There are other flavors, too, best left to the viewer to discover, but what they all add up to is something fun and fit for the slushy season. A well-cast Greg Kinnear stars in "Thin Ice" as a slippery insurance agent whose elastic ethics are further stretched by financial trouble.

While wondering how the Eagles think their "agent for social change" is doing, it's time to empty out the mailbag:     - Al   Al, Apparently witnesses can't be forced to cooperate. More vexing: neither can quarterbacks "on thin ice," even if they admit it's their "last chance. " At training camp the other day, Vick said he learned of the shooting "15 or 20 minutes" after it happened. Impressive he found out so quickly. The guy should be a reporter.

BETHLEHEM, Pa. - Michael Vick arrived at Lehigh on Monday for his first training camp in three years. With one more slip, the Eagles quarterback acknowledged, it could be his last. Usually, on the day Eagles rookies and selected veterans report to Lehigh University, the subject line is the team's prospects for the season. But Vick's appearance and his first long-form comments on the June 25 shooting that occurred after his birthday party overshadowed anything football related.

BETHLEHEM, Pa. - Andy Reid has employed the same talking points for more than a decade. You know them well. They're like lyrics from a song you can't forget. One of Reid's favorite phrases, ratty and worn from years of use, is that he needs to put his players in better positions. As far as Michael Vick is concerned, Reid, Jeffrey Lurie and Joe Banner failed miserably on that front. They set Vick up to fail. The good-citizen bar was set too high above his head for him to clear. On Monday, shortly before he reported to training camp, Vick was cleared by the NFL to play football.

THE 76ERS HAVE made it easy to pick on them. Every level of criticism is fair when an NBA team is on pace to win 30 games while raising serious questions about its long-term goals and how it will achieve them. But overshadowed by the Sixers' misery is the fact that the other tenant of the Wachovia Center - the Flyers - just started a 22-game sprint to the finish of a season that could end up nearly as disappointing as the basketball team's. Unless the Flyers completely roll over, it's highly unlikely they will miss the playoffs like the Sixers.

A public-private partnership is stepping up to save three city skating rinks whose futures were on thin ice. Mayor Nutter and Ed Snider, chairman of Comcast-Spectacor, announced yesterday that the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation would take over operation and programming at three rinks that officials said were targeted for possible closing amid the city's budget troubles. Comcast-Spectacor owns the Flyers. At a news conference at the Rink at Simons Recreation and Teen Access Center at 7200 Woolston Ave. in the West Oak Lane section, Nutter hailed the partnership with the foundation.

The bettors examining Week 3 of the NFL season will find some interesting contests from which to choose. Eight teams stood 2-0 at the end of yesterday afternoon's games but none will be paired next week. Two of those unbeatens are underdogs on the road, and one is not favored at home. The Carolina Panthers, who have shown themselves to be the league's comeback kids in the first two weeks of the season, are 3 1/2-point underdogs at Minnesota, where the Vikings have been mostly run and little pass in their offense.

Manufacturing activity in the Philadelphia area contracted in March for the fourth consecutive month, and a separate set of economic indicators for future activity from the Conference Board weakened for the fifth month in a row. Both of yesterday's reports - one regional and one national - reinforced the perception of an economy skating on thin ice despite repeated actions by the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates and calm turmoil in the...

Shane Lewis says playing goalie in ice hockey is more dangerous than driving a race car. He should know. The Twin Valley High School junior, a Honey Brook resident, is the goalie for his high school team as well as for the Quakers, a club team based out of West Chester that plays in the Delaware Valley Hockey League. And he has been driving race cars very successfully since he was 6. He does much of his racing at tracks in Kutztown, Ephrata and Lebanon, but has traveled all over the United States.

Imagine an Olympics without mountain sports. No more bad-boy Bode Millers. No dramatic Lindsey Kildow wipeouts and comebacks. No "Flying Tomato" performing gnarly backside 900s. Sure, there'd still be skating, hockey and curling. But what's a rink sport to hurtling downhill at 80 miles per hour? If global warming continues unabated, fewer mountains will have sufficient snow - even man-made - to train athletes or host Winter Games. Skiing and snowboarding will slowly melt away. A 2003 United Nations Environment Programme report has concluded that because of climate change, resorts below 5,000 feet, including most in the Northeastern United States, will no longer be "snow safe" within 50 years.