The Skolney Blog

Top 25: 1. Avengers: Endgame I still think it is a tiny notch down from Infinity War (I will simply never like Fat Thor), but this film is a grand achievement that nails every single big moment. And the portals scene will never not elicit chills.  2. Booksmart One of those movies that instantly arrives feeling like a classic you've been watching for years. Beanie Feldstein with one of the performances of the year.  3. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood Quentin's most laid back film (and one of his funniest) was another instant classic, with career best performances by DiCaprio and Pitt.  4. Knives Out Rian Johnson's brilliantly written and plotted whodunit, with a great cast full of entertaining actors at the top of their game.  5. Waves The most emotionally involving film I've seen in a long time. The first half of the film breaks your heart, then the 2nd half puts it back together. 6. Parasite Bong Joon-Ho's dark satire has more genuine surprises in it than any film th...

Pretty incredible game up in Seattle. It looked like yet again things were going to go the Packers way, that the 49ers were going to blow a late 2 score lead and give the Packers home field advantage.  That whole last minute was crazy. I was screaming for the Niners to use timeouts, but they didn't. Then Seattle got a pass to the 1, so it looked like all the time would run off AND Seattle would score. They spiked the ball, then they made such a production of bringing in Marshawn Lynch that they actually got a delay of game. 2 incompletions followed. Then on 4th down Wilson zipped a pass to the goalline, and the tackle was made with the ball literally inches from the white.  Not since Mike Jones stopped Kevin Dyson one yard shy of the endzone in super bowl 34 has a single tackle held such importance.  That tackle affected every NFC playoff team's fortunes. It could be the biggest play of the whole NFL season depending on how things play out.  Those inches mean that ne...

Bears 21 Vikings 19 Eh, we lost. 11-5 would have looked nicer than 10-6 but whatever. What is there even to say about such a non-entity of a game? Sean Mannion looked very bad. Mike Boone fumbled, was wholly responsible for an interception, and even got safetied(not his fault), but ended up with a nice stat line thanks to a couple big runs. Dan Bailey made all his kicks. Odenigbo had a TD called back The Bears played all their guys, yet had their toughest time of their 4 wins over us in the 2 years of the Nagy era. Not sure what that means. Probably nothing. For much of the afternoon we seemed to be setting up for Vikings-Packers round 3 next week, as the Lions led the Packers the whole day. But then, and I know this is a shocking development, a couple of huge calls by the refs helped the Packers get the game winning field goal. Whatever. We'll see if the refs can carry the worst 13-3 team in NFL history all the way to a super bowl. So at the moment we will be going to either New O...

Overall best of list coming soon, but I figured I'd do new year by year lists first.  2010: 1. Inception. Peak Christopher Nolan both in concept and execution.  2. Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Aside from a few MCU flicks I'm sure this is the movie from the 2010s I've rewatched the most.  3. Black Swan. Natalie won an Oscar. She should have won ten. 4. Kick Ass. Better than Deadpool.  5. The Social Network. Pretty sure this wasn't in my original top 10, but it's only grown in stature over the years. 6. Easy A. When Emma Stone removed all doubt of her superstardom.  7. The Book Of Eli. Denzel at his absolute badass best. Amazing visuals and score.  8. True Grit.  One of the best westerns ever. Launched Hailee Steinfeld.  9. Blue Valentine. Not the most cheerful watch, but peak performances by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. 10. Toy Story 3. The 4th one was fine, but they really had already finished the series off perfectly.  2011: 1. Moneyba...

The Twins, after a 101 win season and a homerun record, let the Yankees come into Target Field and embarrass us with another playoff sweep. The Gophers, at the end of their best season in many measures for decades, let Wisconsin come in here and dominate us, taking away the Big Ten west title and a Rose Bowl berth. The Vikings, in their biggest home game of the season, let the Packers come into US Bank Stadium and completely humiliate us, clinching the NFC North and reigniting all the bad narratives.  2 of those 3 seasons still have a game or more left, but man, we did not need to see our teams lose to THOSE teams in those ways. 

Packers 23 Vikings 10 Christmas is ruined. Now time for the Festivus airing of grievances.  Entering this MNF game the Vikings already had at best an extreme long shot for an NFC North title. We were at the mercy of the remaining wreckage of the Lions. But we had a win and out scenario to grab the 5 seed and get the NFC East winner in 2 weeks.  Well....all those hopes went up in flames in a disheartening, disgraceful, pitiful performance against the god damn Packers. Were we tanking? Was it decided that going all out to get out of the 6 seed was not worth the trouble? I simply do not understand what I saw. This offensive game plan was nothing short of a disgrace. This was like watching John DeFillippo self-sabotage games last year against the Patriots and Seahawks. Nothing I saw in this game on the offensive side of the ball indicated a desire to win a very important football game.  This game was over at halftime. Even though we were leading 10-9 it felt like we were losi...

As tense as some of these Vikings games have been this year, that Niners-Rams game rivaled them all.  What a weird game. At times each defense looked absolutely dominant, then immediately they would get shredded. The biggest point in the game was that quick 14 point burst by the Niners late in the 1st half, including the.pick six. 21-10 Rams to 24-21 49ers in a matter of seconds The 49ers overcame a lot of mistakes by Garappolo. But he hit 2 huge passes on that final drive. Gould drilled the field goal, and the Vikings are in the playoffs!  I think the Vikings win out anyway, and would therefore be in, but I am hugely relieved that we don't have to sweat it out. All we needed was the refs to pull a fix job on MNF and then we're faced with a must win against the annoying Bears while the Rams would be playing the Cardinals. Same scenario as last year basically. Still a lot to play for. Division is still a long shot, but it would be fun to go into the final Sunday with at least a...

SPOILERS OF COURSE  Chewy's fake out death. What was the point of that? It's cheap enough that they say "oh he was on another transport" when there was only the 1 transport. Out in the open. In the desert. That we saw clearly. In general I can't stand fake deaths. Marvel has done this a bunch too. This movie pretends to kill Chewy, Kylo and Rey, and that female character who Poe has a thing for. Bad look when your plot revolves around Palpatine, a character who was clearly killed in a movie over 30 years ago. Palpatine is way too over the top powerful. A lot of movies do this too, have the big bad, or even the hero sometimes, be so over the top powerful that it's not credible. But it's so beyond anything we ever saw from Palpatine or Vadar or Count Dooku. Imagine if Thanos could do all of what he did in Infinity War without the glove. When Palpatine is wrecking ALL those ships it's just not believable. It seems that the whiny fanboys who never shut up ...

Okay, I did not HATE this movie. I truly didn't. But man does it flub the landing of both this trilogy and the 9 film Skywalker saga. My big issues break down into a few areas. 1. The return of Palpatine. Look, Ian McDiarmid is a terrific actor. He was one of the highlights of the prequels for sure. But why is he back here? The film really doesn't even bother to explain how he is here, or where he has been since ROTJ, or how he managed to somehow amass a whole fleet of Sith. Not to mention that his inclusion really cheapens the ending of ROTJ.  2. The use of Leia. Look, it obviously sucks that Carrie Fisher died, and that it left JJ Abrams and company with an admittedly impossible task in a way to use her in this film and not have it come off as cheap or exploitive. But the Leia scenes here(largely made from TFA cut footage) are uncomfortably awkward and rather clumsily shoehorned in. Plus, the way Leia dies in the film is so bizarrely quick and unmotivated that it does feel ve...

Pelicans 107 Wolves 99 Trash. No other word for that Wolves performance tonight but trash. Hot steaming trash. Riding a 7 game losing streak, but hosting a 6 win Pelicans team rising a 13 game losing streak, the Wolves barfed out one of their worst efforts I have ever seen from them. And I saw a whole lot of garbage basketball during my 2 season ticket holder years in the post-Garnett years.  But I have never sat through a more inept display of.offensive basketball. Absent Towns, the Wolves could not score. Who fails to break 100 points in today's NBA? These clowns couldn't make a 3. They couldn't make a damn layup. They couldn't even run plays, it was just chaos every possession. What the hell dis they do in the 5 days since their last game? None of these players that the Wolves are essentially giving tryouts to this season are any good. Ryan Saunders is clearly in WAY over his head as a head coach. The tank is officially on. Again. 

Vikings 39 Chargers 10 The Vikings took a giant step towards clinching a playoff spot today.  Out in the soccer stadium in LA, mostly full of Vikings fans, the Vikings put together one of their best games of the season, mostly obliterating a Chargers team that, for all their flaws, don't get obliterated. The first half was close. The Vikings came out and went right down the field for an Irv Smith touchdown. Dan Bailey missed his 2nd PAT in 3 weeks, which irked, but he made up for it. But the offense really didn't do a thing the rest of the half.  On defense, we were struggling to get off the field for a while. Philip Rivers was converting a lot of 3rd and longs on us. Our corners were just getting roasted. It looked like a certain shootout.  The only thing that stopped the Chargers offense early was the Chargers. In between their 2 scoring drives, Danielle Hunter forced a fumble deep in their end. We only got a field goal out of it, but they were free points. The biggest ...

Jumanji: The Next Level This is about as good as the first one. As with the first one the plot is not interesting, so when it dominates the 3rd act my interest wanes. But the actors are fun, and they get a tremendous amount of comedic mileage out of the Danny DeVito and Danny Glover impressions. And Karen Gillan is again a total snack. They also tease a 3rd movie that could be a lot of fun.  Dark Waters This has a good story, but I'm not sure it's at all a cinematic story. Mark Ruffalo is terrific. Anne Hathaway is way overqualified for her standard wife role. I think a documentary would have worked better.  Richard Jewell This is a pretty good movie for about 30 minutes. Then after the bombing sequence it just goes completely off the rails into the laziest, most repulsive bit of political propaganda Clint Eastwood has ever delivered. In his imagination, Jewell wasn't just wrongly identified as the bomber by the FBI and media, but he was deliberately targeted by them out of...

Vikings 20 Lions 7 So that's what it feels like to not have heart failure while watching a Vikings game.  It's a feeling I had forgotten, after 4 straight tight games. Today there was no such anxiety. There really was very little to worry about at all, as the Vikings quietly, methodically mauled the faded Lions. The score is not indicative of how this game went. The Vikings absolutely dominated this game from start to finish. But it was similar to those September wins where they got a lead and played things very conservatively after that. After weeks of defensive struggles, today they really shut it down. They didn't give up the big pass plays, aside from 1 or 2 stray ones. They shut down the run. They got off the field on 3rd down. They got a couple turnovers. They got sacks. Sure, everything must be qualified with who they were playing, but opponent hasn't seemed to matter that much of late. The defense needed this. A fairly quiet day from the offense. Kirk played wel...

2019 is really making a late push to be the best movie year of the decade. One good movie after another of late. Ford v Ferrari is just a terrific kind of throwback to a big budget, big star, non-Oscar baiting crowd pleaser that just rarely ever gets made anymore. And hey, it may even contend for some Oscars. Matt Damon is really good, but Christian Bale as usual is the best thing in the film. He's so charming and funny. Loved the racing scenes. Queen & Slim, also very good, is a great example.of taking topical issues(police violence, racism, poverty) and mixing them into a cool genre film. This feels destined to be name dropped in rap lyrics for years to come. The film has a ton of energy and style, and a couple terrific lead performances. Not sure it needed to be over 2 hours though.  Honey Boy is an autobiographical film written by Shia LaBeouf about his own rocky childhood in which he plays his own dad. Something like this would seem destined to be self-indulgent tripe, but...

Seahawks 37 Vikings 30 They almost did it. One game after coming back from 20-0 down against Denver, the heart stopping 2019 Vikings nearly pulled an even bigger rabbit out of their hat. Down 34-17 after the most unspeakably awful quarter of the season, the Vikings rallied and had the ball with a chance to go take the lead and likely win. It's awful that this rally did not go the final length, but honestly I'm not sure I have felt this good about a Vikings team, and a Vikings quarterback, showing this kind of fight in ages. I expected a loss. This is one of those games that going in feels unwinnable. Seattle is basically invincible in the Carroll-Wilson era in primetime home games. They have always had Mike Zimmer's number. And the Seahawks may be the best team in the NFC, with a star QB playing at an MVP level.  Off the bye, the Vikings came out and played a pretty good first half. We went right down the field on the 1st drive for a Cook TD. We got a nifty pick six from Ha...

Packers 31, Giants 13 Blecch. It's not that I expected the Giants to help us out, but man they just gave this one away.  Ravens 20, 49ers 17 Could be a super bowl preview. I think the rain helped the 49ers keep it close. Baltimore is right now clearly the best team in the league. Dolphins 37, Eagles 31 Philly getting lit up by Fitzmagic is pretty hilarious. And to think the Eagles still might be east favorites. It's criminal that either them or Dallas gets to host a playoff game. Titans 31, Colts 17 Ryan Tannehill is the AFC Kirk Cousins. Good QB being dragged down by a bad organization, but then he switches teams and flourishes. Titans could be a dangerous team in January. Steelers 20, Browns 13 Classic Browns. Just when you think they're a playoff threat, they lose to a 3rd string QB and are now a longshot at best. I think the Steelers, while currently the 6, will have trouble holding off the Titans.  Redskins 29, Panthers 21 Carolina was already in trouble. Now they'...

Add 2 more contenders to the year end ten best list.  Knives Out is the Rian Johnson murder mystery with one of the best casts of the year. Most people know Johnson from Star Wars, but my favorite film of his is Brick, and this is him very much back in Brick mode. I loved the way this movie was structured, where instead of waiting the whole movie to find out whodunit, we are basically told flat out maybe 30 minutes into the film(although there is more yet to come). The ultimate reveal really works too, and in between we get just one terrific scene after another. This ensemble is just a ton of fun. Daniel Craig is hilarious, Chris Evans just tears into his douchebag part, and Ana de Armas is completely endearing. The Irishman is Martin Scorsese's $150 million, 3 and a half hour crime epic on Netflix, with DeNiro, Pacino and a more than welcome return by Joe Pesci. I thought watching such a long movie on my phone would be a tedious ordeal, even for a Scorsese film. Instead I watched ...