The Skolney Blog

Giants 4 Twins 3 The last time I saw the Twins play the Giants in person was way back in 2005. In that game, the two teams were tied at 7 in the 9th, before our bullpen (led by Joe Nathan) gave up 7 runs.  The 2023 bullpen didn't quite match that bit of ineptitude on Tuesday night, but it left the Twins in the same place: on the losing end.  This game followed a familiar pattern for the Twins. Get a good start (in thic case by Sonny Gray). Score few runs. Bullpen blows the game. Gray got in a couple jams, but still had a shutout going into the 6th. And a two run honerun by Byron Buxton and a solo shot by Michael Taylor had the Twins up 3-0.  Then disaster. It didn't help that the idiot fans started doing the wave. Why sports fans in this state not only love the wave but refuse to understand WHEN to do it is endlessly irritating.  But for whatever reason, Gray was thrown off. A walk, then a double, then another walk. In comes Jovani Moran, who actually duped us all by...

Sky 77 Lynx 66 Season #25 of Minnesota Lynx basketball tipped off on Friday night, with honestly the lowest expectations for this franchise since before the titles began happening.  Sylvia Fowles retired, cutting the last cord to the championships. And even in her last year the goal was to at least be in the mix for a title. After all it was just 2 years ago that the Lynx had the 3rd best record in the league.  This is not that situation. Realistically the ceiling for the 2023 Lynx is probably just making the playoffs at all. And most prognosticators don't even have them doing that.  Game 1 did not do a lot to discourage that line of thought.  Basically all that really needs to be talked about from this game is the 2nd quarter. The Lynx led after 1. At halftime they were trailing by 17. That's because they were outscored 22-3 in a ludicrous quarter where they couldn't make a shot, and could not stop turning the ball over.  The 2nd half was a formality. A couple ...

The Fast and the Furious franchise is now 22 years old. I was 22 when the first (and still, to me, best) movie came out. So I have lived half my life with this franchise now.  The tale of how this franchise came, seemingly went, then roared back into one of the major tentpoles of the last decade, is well told. It's a franchise that has probably peaked at the box office. Furious 7 had the attention due to the handling of Paul Walker's death, and it became a billion dollar film.  The franchise lived on. But it's been a bumpier ride. I thought part 8 was pretty damn good, but it was less popular. The Hobbs and Shaw spinoff movie was kind of a  non-entity. I literally haven't seen it since theaters. And then F9, delayed due to COVID, came out a couple years ago to blockbuster starved fans like me and....left me a little cold. I don't stop to watch that one on TV ever. It's a much more dour, serious film, and felt so bloated and messy that it seemed this series was o...

1998 was still a summer where we didn't have giant blockbusters every week. They were sparse, and you really looked forward to those few big movies.  And curiously for that summer, two of the big ones had similar premises: An asteroid is about to hit the earth and something must be done to stop it.  Now, we will get to Armageddon, which I adore and hold up not only as one of the absolute best 90s summer blockbusters, but one of my favorite films of all time PERIOD.  But don't short change the first asteroid movie out of the gate short. Deep Impact came out two months earlier, had its own success, and while it hasn't endured quite the same, it's a very well done disaster movie in its own right. I think the key distinction with Deep Impact and Armageddon (I promise this isn't just a blog of comparisons) is that Deep Impact is a lot more realistic film about what might really happen if this scenario presented itself (well, the whole collaborating with Russi...

1983: You will get no argument from me that The Empire Strikes Back is the best film from the original Star Wars trilogy. But for my money Return Of The Jedi is pretty close. As with episodes 4 and 5, I first really saw ROTJ during the special edition releases. I kind of wish I had been able to experience the original release for it. I'm sure that 3 years wait from the ESB cliffhanger was something else. Endgame-ish. For me basically the only reason I still have this movie as my 2nd favorite of the OT is that that opening half hour is still pretty draggy. And the musical sequence was easily the worst special edition choice. But once the sail barge sequence hits we are off. RIP Jabba and Boba Fett (for a while).  But what about the Ewoks? What about them? They are fine. Calm down. There's some amusing stuff with them.  All of the Luke-Vader stuff in this film is fantastic. And it culminates in that amazing sequence aboard the new Death Star where Palpatine tries to ...

In theaters: BIG GEORGE FOREMAN Man, even by the standards of by the numbers biopic this is really done without a trace of novelty. Rather boring at times and beset by some weird pacing (George goes from having never boxed to fighting for the heavyweight crown in about 10 minutes of screen time). The film remains watchable due to some solid performances (Khris Davis is an appealing lead) and the fact that I really did not know much of Foreman's story. It's a story deserving of a better telling.  SISU Hard to find a more single minded film than this. A Finnish man runs afoul of Nazis towards the end of WW2 and goes about killing the shit out of them. The scenes of Nazis getting killed deliver, but that is really all the film has. No real story or character, and the lead never speaks, which comes off as an annoying gimmick.  THE COVENANT Guy Ritchie has been on, I think, a pretty underrated run of movies the last several years. This one is unusual for him in that it is a pretty ...

Guardians of the Galaxy was the MCU's big risky homerun swing back in 2014. Largely unknown characters, weird settings, definitely not a safe movie. But it hit. Big. And was hugely influential towards what the MCU became.  I'm one of the few, I guess, who actually liked Volume 2 more. I just thought the jokes and emotion hit more.  Then it took 6 years to get this trilogy capper. There was the foolish (and temporary) firing of James Gunn over some old tweets. Gunn ended up doing The Suicide Squad. Then the pandemic delayed everything. But now Gunn, in his last Marvel gig before taking charge at DC, gets to close the trilogy. So how is it? Well, it's an MCU movie so of course it's good. Even really good at times. After one viewing I would rank it 3rd in the trilogy, but it hits some emotional high points that few franchise entries have touched. Vol. 3 does take a little while to get rolling. I was a little unclear of the timeline. It's established quickly that Peter ...

I cannot believe that the summer of 1998 is 25 years old. One of the greatest, most formative times of my life.  And surely one of the points in my life where movies meant the most. I wasn't quite able to drive to go to see them on my own yet (next summer, baby), but I was always there. So what a time for what, for my money, was the best movie summer of the 90s. In fact, I could legitimately do about ten special throwbacks from this summer and not be stretching. I won't. I just don't have the time.  But it was a movie summer that was as diverse in its great films as any summer ever. And it started off with one of the greatest films by one of my all time favorite directors. Spike Lee's He Got Game By 1998 Spike was well established as one of the greats. And established as a maniacal Knicks fan. I guess it figured that at some point he was going to do a basketball movie. But true to form he didn't do just some sports film. He Got Game is about basketball, but like man...