The Skolney Blog

First of all, I'm just so damn happy we get a full season this year. While it's possible COVID stuff could still interfere with some games here and there, there is no way it can get pervasive enough again to cancel the season. We get April, May, June and full July baseball this year! The Twins look for a 3rd straight division title, which they last did from 2002-2004. That period is also the last time they won a playoff series, or even a playoff game. Look, the ONLY way you can say the 2021 Twins are a success is if they end this preposterous 18 game losing streak. Anything short of that is an unmitigated failure. This will not change. So can this team do it? They should have a chance. This is certainly a team that should be firmly in the mix for the playoffs. The division seems to be a 2 team race between the Twins and White Sox. The American League overall looks pretty weak, so a wild card would certainly be in play. The Twins pitching should at worst be solid and at best cou...

Welcome back, blockbusters! The 4th film in WB's monster verse, this one pits Godzilla against King Kong. Now, both are good guys, so amongst other things they have to come up with a reason for them to fight. And as with most things in this movie, they nail it. GvK is an absolute blast. It delivers everything you could ask for from this kind of movie. And it's all the more welcome since we haven't had movies like this at all in over a year. Long story short, Godzilla attacks a city for unknown reasons, and an obviously shady guy from a shady corporation hatches a plan to help defend humanity from Godzilla. And the plan involves taking Kong from his Skull Island home to a place called Hollow Earth, a place deep beneath the sea where Kong, Godzilla, and all other titans come from. This movie has just enough quality in its human characters and human story to keep you interested between Kong and Godzilla stuff. Nothing truly memorable in the performances, but I always like seei...

1991: Okay, this is simply one of the straight up coolest movies of all time. This film gets a lot of the credit for kickstarting the wave of "black" films in the 90s. That's debatable, considering Spike Lee's career was already well underway and we had other films like House Party. But the 1-2 punch of this and Boyz N The Hood (see you in July) definitely upped the ante as far as box office. I would have been 13 when I first saw this. Definitely not a movie a 13 year old should watch. I was always into it though. I think part of it was that I really was new to crime movies at all. This flick is just massively entertaining. Wesley Snipes is at his absolute peak here as Nino Brown. Ice T is pretty much the coolest guy to ever live here. Chris Rock is kind of amazing in his 1st and still probably best major role. The whole cast is super memorable. Even Judd Nelson is great in this. It's a great time capsule kind of movie. It also had one of the all time ...

This weekend one year ago was when COVID hit closest to home for me. Sports had been taken out, but when they shut down theaters that's what got me. It was the last weekend for over 5 months that I could go to a movie.  One year later theaters are back up and running. Granted the release schedule has been decimated, and a lot of big movies have been given streaming releases, but at least there is stuff to see. Fingers crossed Black Widow makes it.  And I ended up using up all 3 of my AMC A-list spots this weekend.  1. TOM AND JERRY I was hoping this could be like The Adventures Of Rocky and Bullwinkle (movie version of an old show, cartoon characters in the real world, super cute female lead). It's not. It's content to just be a silly little kids movie with no ambition. We get a very, VERY dull celebrity wedding subplot (where we learn Colin Jost can not act), and a lot of mugging by the overqualified Chloe Moretz and Michael Pena.  THE FATHER In almost any other yea...

Greenland Okay, COVID really robbed us of this one. This would have made for a dynamite big screen experience. This is the best disaster movie in years. The premise is that a comet is going to pass really close to earth, but it turns out that in fact this comet is actually going to strike the earth and essentially wipe out humanity. It's a grand scale premise, but the film keeps the focus small (the worldwide destruction is just stuff heard about on the radio). It's almost exclusively just following Gerard Butler as he races to get his family to safety. This movie has a few stumbles in its middle act, but it's really compelling, and genuinely suspenseful. I really appreciated how it took its premise seriously. There's no winking. This was like 2012 crossed with Deep Impact, with a little War of the Worlds mixed in.  The Mauritanian The story of a man held for years at Guantanamo Bay without charges. The story is compelling on its own. The telling is a bit dull. I actual...

The Vikings have already been making news before free agency officially gets going next week. Now, we got good news when the official cap number for 2021 was announced. It's higher than most were predicting. Plus the Vikings have some rollover cap space. So for all the chicken little crap we heard about how screwed the Vikings were with the cap this year, they are already under it.  They cut Kyle Rudolph last week. An expected move with Irv Smith and Tyler Conklin both younger and cheaper, and arguably better at least cumulatively. The fanbase was weirdly mad about this, but it was the correct call. Dan Bailey was cut. Again an expected move, although they apparently did try to get him to take a pay cut first. Either way he would have been in a camp competition. So now that competition with be between Greg Joseph and TBD.  Then today they cut Riley Reiff. This is the big move. It saves them a lot of money, and signals to me that they are definitely planning at least one signif...