The Skolney Blog

The Twins just passed the midway point of the 2023 regular season. It came in the middle of a series in which they were easily dismissed by the Braves.  Now, being outclassed by one of the best teams in baseball is not in itself shameful. But it was just one more series where this poorly constructed, and at best questionably coached team displayed all their critical problems. Overall the Twins sit at 40-42 and are very much in the race in the so far historically woeful AL Central. The apologists will tell you that all that matters is being in the race. Well, good news then. The Twins are probably not inept enough to tumble out of the division race, and nobody else is good enough to run away with it. So no matter what we are watching, the odds are extremely good that the Twins will be playing meaningful baseball well into September. But what the hell are we doing?  This is without question the worst "contending" Twins team I have ever seen. They are just a bad product.  Th...

Twins 6 Red Sox 0 Twins game #3 for me this season was game 10 of a 10 game homestand that saw this team sweep a 2 gamer against then first place Milwaukee, before dropping 3 of 4 in grotesque fashion to the Tigers, and then getting blasted in the first 2 against Boston. They did sneak out a 10th inning walkoff in game 3.  Which leads us to Thursday afternoon, and the kind of hot sunny (now) summer day that you dream about. And the Twins played their most complete game in weeks, with their best starting pitching performance in over 5 years.  The Red Sox went with an opener, and it went poorly. Carlos Correa blasted a solo shot into the second deck, and then a couple batters later Byron Buxton hit an absolute bomb 466 feet that, had it gone much further, would have hit the construction crane. In the second, Michael A. Taylor hit a 2 run double. Buxton took it a little easy in his next at bat and only hit one 465 feet. Royce Lewis got an RBI single.  It was more than enough...

The DCEU is dribbling to a close. With James Gunn set to oversee a total reboot of everything, we are getting a final few movies that were already made, but which also likely have no connection to whatever comes next.  The Flash is very much still a part of that lame duck Snyderverse. It shares actors, a lot of its visual style, and plot points.  I've been mostly indifferent to this cinematic universe for a while now, and have barely cared about any of these since the first Wonder Woman. But I had some high hopes for The Flash. I'm more familiar with the character thanks to the just ended TV series, so when this film promised a version of Flashpoint I knew what that meant. Mostly I was into this because it was bringing back Michael Keaton as Batman, and introducing the ridiculously gorgeous Sasha Calle as Supergirl. Less into the actual star, Ezra Miller, who has been on a rather incredible self-destruction bender. I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that The Flash is ul...

LYNX 91 SPARKS 86 Sunday night the Lynx retired Sylvia Fowles's jersey #34, the 4th of the 5 HOFers who led them to championships. (Maya Moore, now officially retired, will surely complete the set next year) But before that post-game ceremony, the current Lynx team offered up a rousing win worthy of the glory days. The Lynx came in a dismal 1-7, most of those losses having come in winnable games too. There are no illusions that this will be a team competing for title #5 anytime soon. But you still don't want a record like that.  The Lynx played pretty solid for 3 quarters. Showed a little more coherence on offense. We're a little better on defense. Didn't have quite as many sloppy turnovers. Improvement.  Still, they fell asleep just enough in the 4th quarter to let the Sparks get a 9-0 run to turn a 2 point deficit into 11. And with under 4 minutes left at this point it looked more than hopeless that the Lynx would get their 1st home win of 2023. But then the Lynx came...

In Theaters: THE SUPER MARIO BROS MOVIE So I finally saw the year's biggest smash hit, which has made a billion dollars. THIS is a billion dollar movie? I mean, sure, it's better than that infamous 1993 movie. There are some fun game references that even I get (my SMB experience ended in the early 90s). The animation is colorful. But it is just an empty, ambition-less movie that really bored me.  SANCTUARY A two hander in which a man pays a dominatrix to humiliate him, and then gets blackmailed by her. (Can you believe I double featured this with SMB?) I thought this movie, set almost entirely in a hotel room, got repetitive, but man does this have a dazzling performance by the up and coming Margaret Qualley.  TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS The first Transformers movie in 5 years is in the continuity of Bumblebee, with no Hailee Steinfeld but with new characters both human and robot. I think this one does a really good job setting things up in the opening act. Anthony Ramos ...

I remember when the first animated Spiderman movie, Into The Spiderverse, was announced I wasn't interested at all. We had live action Spiderman going. What use is an animated version?  But then it came out...and it was pretty good. The animation style was very cool. It gave a good big screen intro to Miles Morales. It was packed with easter eggs. It did well and actually won the Oscar for best animated feature. Still wasn't a favorite movie of mine or anything, cause I wasn't that into the actual story in it, but I was up for more.  And Spiderman: Across The Spiderverse is more. More characters. More worlds. More references. This is a spectacular sequel that bests the original in almost every way. This time I really did get into the story. And I was even more astounded by the scope of visual creativity on display in every moment. It makes most other big screen animation look like stick figure drawings.  This time Miles is wrapped up in a multiverse spanning p...

Can't Hardly Wait opened one year and one day after I graduated high school. I was one of those weirdos who actually liked high school, so I had nostalgia for that time almost instantly.  The movies added to this in a big way, since the late 90s and early 2000s had an explosion of high school-set shows and movies. 1998 was not as full of these movies as the following years would be, but we did get one of the very best.  Can't Hardly Wait was a movie that was on my radar in a big way. I was eagerly awaiting this thing long before release, when it was just called The Party. Why? Jennifer Love Hewitt. In 1998 she was just about the biggest deal there was. This was just a classic teen movie, the first one of its kind in years (Clueless is kind of its own thing).Throw a big ensemble of young actors together and see what happens. For me, its closest comp in that time was actually Dazed and Confused, another movie set on the last day of school and featuring a crop of budd...

1993: So what is there left to say about one of the most beloved and talked about movies of the 90s? I have always looked back at Jurassic Park as my one childhood wonder movie experience (even though I was just out of junior high when this movie opened). As a kid I wasn't drawn to the big spectacle movies that were out in that time. I mostly went to see comedies, animated movies, the occasional "big" film but not often. But this one got me. I vividly remember going to see this movie on opening day, and that whole T-Rex scene (you know the one) was awe-inspiring movie magic. As was basically the whole movie. Universal has tried for decades to tap back in to the brilliance of this Spielberg original. And while they've made a lot of money, none of the subsequent films have ever come close in quality. Or in popularity. This thing was literally still playing in theaters well into 1994.  What makes the original still the best? Well, obviously, it still tells th...