The Skolney Blog

2020 took everything, but I will not be stopped from doing a top 10. Of course, this is a list culled from maybe only a third as many films as I see in a given year. I have no idea when the last time was that I saw such a large percentage of a year's releases outside of theaters. In fact only 3 of the 10 were seen in theaters. And of course many of the big movies that might have been on the list never came. So there is only 1 franchise movie on the list. And because of movies getting released in all different ways, there are some movies that made it out that I just haven't seen yet. Everything I have seen and heard tells me that Promising Young Woman could be incredible, but I have no idea when I will get to see it. So here goes it with the most woefully incomplete top ten list since I began doing top ten lists. And I'm doing them alphabetically, cause I just am. The list: Birds of Prey: Just a super fun DC romp with Margot Robbie flanked by a bevy of badass ladies. Da 5 Bl...

The year from hell in nearly every way imaginable, from the same stuff that made everyone suffer to the personal stuff in my life that piled onto the misery more and more. Strangely it all really went to hell right after my birthday. 41 has sure sucked. Perhaps I get too wrapped up in sports and movies but I think having those escapes ripped away for most of the year was the worst part. 2020 would have been a whole lot more tolerable if I was still able to go see Black Widow and Fast 9 and No Time To Die and countless others. 2020 would have been a whole lot more tolerable if we had a real baseball season and I could have gone to Target Field, or if I could have gone to Vikings games. Or Lynx games. Or Gopher football games. To say nothing of how COVID screwed up all those seasons to begin with.  Fewest movies seen since probably 1994. First year with no Twins games since 2001. First year with no Vikings or Gopher football games since 2005. First year with no Lynx games since 2009....

Saturday games: Tampa lit up the Lions, who managed to actually give a worse defensive effort than we did. If Tampa didn't call off the dogs they score 60 easily. Of course Arizona loses to the 49ers with their 3rd string QB. That would have kept us alive if we had won ANY of our last 3. Now Arizona is on the outside. The last few minutes of Dolphins-Raiders was crazy. Daniel Carlson shanked a PAT, but also got the would be winning field goal, until the Raiders commit one of the all time chokes by giving up a huge pass and facemask simultaneously. They also blew the time management by refusing to score the touchdown but not running the clock all the way down. So bye bye Vegas. Sunday games: Redzone wasn't really available to me most of the day, so I went old school and watched whatever the networks offered me. Initially I was focused on Bears-Jaguars, but that game quickly went south because suddenly Trubisky is unstoppable. So I mostly watched Chiefs-Falcons, which was surpris...

The pandemic robbed us of basically an entire year of movies, but here comes Wonder Woman 1984 right at the end of 2020 to at least give us some salvation.  But instead of watching it on an IMAX screen, I watched it on my phone on HBO MAX. Not the ideal experience. I will never not prefer the big screen.  I'm sure this soured my enjoyment of the film a little, but WW84 is really just an okay movie. And okay for this movie feels like a pretty big disappointment. Film starts great. There's a fun prologue featuring a young Diana competing in some sort of Themiscyran Olympics. Then there's a dandy sequence as we cut to 1984 and see a montage of Wonder Woman running around and stopping bad guys. It's got just the right old fashioned gee whiz kind of tone. But man, that strong start is just a tease. The next hour plus is almost entirely action free, and instead it's all about the main story involving this mystical rock that grants wishes and this guy Maxwell Lord (Pedro P...

SAINTS 52 VIKINGS 33 I suppose 2020 could not have possibly found a more appropro way to stick it to the Vikings one final time. In their first game of the calendar year they went to the Superdome and pulled off one of the biggest upset wins in franchise history, where Mike Zimmer spun a defensive masterpiece and Kirk hit all the big throws to take down a 13 win Saints team. Just shy of 12 months later, in their last game of this godforsaken year, they returned to the Superdome only to surrender the most points they have given up since 1963(😳) and be officially eliminated from the playoffs. On Christmas Day no less. Typically I do these game blogs and more or less go drive by drive, but this game was just one big blob of defensive ineptitude. Zimmer's patchwork defense, held together for much of the season with scotch tape and baling wire, just completely gave way. 52 points. The most points in 57 years. And honestly it could have been worse if we were facing prime Drew Brees. Fra...

BEARS 33 VIKINGS 27 An exhausting season in an exhausting year basically reached its conclusion today in an exhausting game that, fittingly, confirmed that all this exhaustion will not really have any payoff. For the 2nd time in 3 years the Vikings concluded their home schedule by having the Bears come into US Bank Stadium and end our playoff hopes. No, mathematically this is not technically the case yet, but, as someone who has held out hope as long as I could, let me assure you that the Vikings no longer have any chance of making the playoffs. It's over. The holes were too big. 1-5 was too big a hole. The schedule made a playoff run possible. But what good does an "easy" home schedule do for you in a season where you have no home fans, and no home field advantage? Today the Vikings finished their 1st losing season at home since 2011 by falling to a Bears team that we already beat on the road. And like most of our other home games, we really didn't play well. Familia...

Wisconsin 20 Gophers 17 OT This awful Gophers season was already over following last week's mediocre victory over a bad Nebraska team. Somehow this awful team had evened up their record at 3-3. It wasn't good. Most of it was bad, but at least it was over and you could save some face. But then the Big Ten did a horrible thing to us. They announced that the Gophers had to play another game, and that it was going to be against Wisconsin. No! COVID had mercifully spared us from another embarrassing loss to those shithead fans. Now we had to play them. And a bunch of dumb rubes CELEBRATED this news.  And fittingly, this awful season ended in a disgusting, rather humiliating defeat. Although not in an expected blowout, just in an eminently winnable game that the Badgers seemed to be begging to lose, only for the sorry ass Gophers to refuse the gift. This game had some amusing twists, but the game was decided the moment Tanner Morgan threw that endzone pick. An unacceptable throw. Mor...

HUBIE HALLOWEEN (2020) Well, 2020 has been full of unexpected developments, and near the top of the surprise list is that the Adam Sandler Halloween Netflix comedy was kind of solid. It's not high art by any means. After Uncut Gems these flicks feel more like slumming than ever. But this one was actually funny at points, and it has a lot of fun callbacks to the classic Sandler movies.  HONEST THIEF (2020) Liam Neeson's a serial bank robber who wants to come clean and restart his life, but it's not that easy. It's a midpack Neeson actioner. The plot is pedestrian and the action itself is just okay, but Neeson's a lot of fun in this. I'm glad he hasn't quit doing these movies just yet.  FREAKY (2020) Likely my last theatrical experience for 2020, Freaky mashes up a body switch comedy with a slasher flick. And with the director of the Happy Death Day movies you expect something pretty excellent. Instead you get a decent movie that I wished were better. The movi...

BUCCANEERS 26 VIKINGS 14 I thought the Vikings would lose this game. Facing a superior team, coming off a bye mostly healthy, with an already depleted defense pushed to the limit without Eric Kendricks...I mean it would have been truly one of the signature wins of Mike Zimmer's coaching career. But the fact that the win never came is equal parts frustrating and infuriating. Most of this roster played well enough to win today. But one inside saboteur and a group of biased zebras, sprinkled with some horribly timed blocking meltdowns, has us once again sitting outside of the playoffs. The Vikings had the gameplan today. They did. Facing one of the NFL's best run defenses, the Vikings came out and refused to concede the matter. Dalvin ran great right from the start. We mixed in some Boone and Abdullah. And even Kirk got out for some good scrambles. We controlled the ball. And certainly this was going to pay huge dividends later in the game with play action. Except none of that end...

VIKINGS 27 JAGUARS 24 OT On the morning of November 1st the Vikings awoke, coming off their bye week sitting at a depressing 1-5 and having to play the Packers at Lambeau. On December 6th they go to sleep sitting in the last wild card spot after winning 5 of 6. I do not know what the next 4 weeks hold. I do know that the last 6 weeks has been one of the strangest of all the many rollercoasters I have ridden in 30+ years of watching the Vikings. It has been a season unto itself, so full of wild twists and turns that really regardless of where this overall season ends up it has carved its own place in Vikings lore. Fittingly this seemingly blah game against the 1-10 Jaguars became the weirdest of all. I felt almost angry as Dan Bailey hit his chip shot field goal late in overtime. This game should not have come down to that. This was a game in which the Vikings had a 1st and goal at the 1 in the 4th quarter leading 19-16 and yet still needed 2 big turnovers and a missed field goal to esc...

1990: I was absolutely the exact right audience at the exact right time for Home Alone. And for an 11 year old in 1990 this movie was pure candy. At that age nothing was more cool than the idea of being at home all by yourself with no supervision. All the other stuff in this movie was kind of secondary to just that idea. But I loved the movie overall and it's maybe the 1st movie I really strongly recall the theater experience for.  Then I reviled this movie. Look, at 11 years old this movie worked for me, but by, say, 13 or 14 I had started watching a lot more R rated movies and started listening to rap. There was nothing I could have been LESS interested in for basically a decade than watching freaking Home Alone. But the years passed and I started to have fond feelings again for the movie. Nowadays I can enjoy watching this movie again for purely nostalgic reasons. There is such a warm feeling to a lot of this movie, and that helps to excuse that, honestly, a lot of t...

VIKINGS 28 PANTHERS 27 It was over. Game. Season. All of it. When, with just over 2 minutes left today Chad Beebe muffed a punt inside the Vikings own 10 and the Panthers recovered, that was simply the final mistake among many that had doomed the Vikings to a terrible loss that was going to.put the final nail in the coffin to the 2020 season. Instead this became maybe the most miraculous Vikings victory since the Minneapolis Miracle. Just when all appeared completely lost, this team crawled back out of the grave they spent much of the afternoon digging for themselves. To be sure, the Vikings did not play well today. The first half was decent enough. In an unwelcome throwback to September, we had that thing again where the first offensive series was really good and then the offense sputtered. The run game never really got going. Kirk made some plays but the OL play was really rough with Ezra Cleveland out again. Their 7-0 lead held up for a while but eventually Teddy Bridgewater hit a c...

COWBOYS 31 VIKINGS 28 I don't think I have anything left to give emotionally to the 2020 Minnesota Vikings season. I think today sucked it out of me.  This season, man. Everything has just been seemingly engineered to make me as miserable as possible at all times. Yes, even when things go good.  The 3 game win streak was great. It really was. Winning at both Green Bay and Chicago was great. But even those wins set up expectations and raised hopes that this Vikings team just cannot live up to. It just adds to the disappointment and heartbreak that I feel after watching this seemingly resurrected season euthanized as the Vikings just let a 2-7 team that has been a punchline for most of this season and is led by a backup QB and a lousy defense come in to US Bank Stadium and realistically end their season. This was unacceptable. You have it all there in front of you after crawling back to 4-5. A 3 game homestand against bad teams that could set you up for a chance at a playoff spo...

VIKINGS 19 BEARS 13 For 20 years, the most hated game on every Vikings schedule has been the Chicago road game. Year after year that game is torture to sit through, as good Vikings teams inexplicably fall apart there and bad teams look even worse. Things happen there that defy logic and reason, so even though the Vikings and Bears were decidedly trending in opposite directions entering Monday night, I still dreaded this game, knowing that some weird Soldier Field shit (aka SFS) was going to happen again and destroy our recent revived playoff hopes. And some SFS most definitely happened again, but this time we were finally able to overcome it and get a crucial win that sets this team up now to truly make a real run at this. In perhaps the most surprising development of the night, the Vikings honestly looked like the markedly better team the whole game. Right from the start we moved the ball, only to have our opening drive end due to a Kyle Rudolph fumble that was not a damn fumble (SFS)...

The Vikings faint but slightly resurrected playoff hopes hinge on two things. One is that we gotta do our part and win, starting with MNF tomorrow. But we also need these teams ahead of us to lose some games.  This seemed like a prime Sunday to get some of that outside help.  And we got NONE. It was a total disaster of a day from a hopeful Vikings fan perspective.  The early window of games teased us, as the Christian McCaffrey-less Panthers were hanging with Tampa. And most improbably, the Packers were struggling badly at home against the Jaguars. I had written off the division, but a Packer loss would mean we could pull within 2.  Neither was meant to be. The Packers pulled out a win due to a combo of Jacksonville being hideous, and naturally a fair share of ref ball. And the Panthers spent the 2nd half doing just about everything wrong you can do, and Tampa won in big fashion. The late window saw the Rams beat Seattle as Russell Wilson, who could do no wrong again...

IOWA 35 GOPHERS 7 Losing a handful of good players to the NFL does not excuse this.  The Gophers have plummeted so massively from where they were after winning the Outback Bowl that anyone questioning whether last season was simply one of the great flukes in Minnesota sports history can't be blamed a bit. This team is AWFUL. A complete fiasco on both sides of the ball. Tanner Morgan is complete garbage now. I never bought him as a pro prospect even last year, but my god it looks like he has had a brain wipe and completely forgotten how to play quarterback. Tonight's game was somehow within reach much of the way, cause Iowa isn't that good themselves. But Morgan could not complete a pass. He couldn't handle any pressure. He could not do ANYTHING. I have no idea why Fleck didn't bench his ass after that preposterous 3rd quarter pick that nuked the last true chance they had to win the game.  Rashod Bateman has to be lamenting his decision to play this season after all....

VIKINGS 34 LIONS 20 This strange Vikings season has reached its midpoint. They are not where I thought they would be (I figured 4-4 at worst). They have at times looked absolutely hapless, at times brilliant. Today they looked much more the latter in earning their 1st home win of the year, dispatching the Lions. While less eye opening than their big upset in Green Bay  last week, this too was a complete performance on both sides of the ball. And it was the first game of the season that was kind of no sweat. The Vikings got up multiple scores early, finishing their 1st 2 surgical drives with a Cook run and a short Kirk to Irv pass. The Lions had a scoring chance, but Matt Prater missed a field goal. Once you saw that Prater of all people could miss a kick against us there was little.doubt who would win the day. The Lions did.get in the endzone late in the first half to close to within 13-10. But then we got one of the best 2 minute drills in recent memory. With 1:30 left and 3 timeo...