The Skolney Blog

In theaters: MICKEY 17 Bong Joon-Ho's first film since the brilliant best picture winner Parasite is a classic blank check movie. He was given a huge budget for this deliberately oddball sci-fi movie with Robert Pattinson as a guy who keeps dying and then being copied. This thing is maniacally entertaining in spots, and sometimes grates (Mark Ruffalo is really bad), but even though it is unquestionably an unholy mess, I'm glad it exists.  LAST BREATH This movie about deep sea divers getting stuck under the water barely has enough material to even make it to feature length, but that middle section under the water is undeniably gripping.  THE MONKEY Last summer director, Osgood Perkins had a big hit with Longlegs, a horror oddity that I really didn't like. I liked this one a lot more. It's much more of a horror comedy, with crazy elaborate death scenes. I laughed a lot at this.  NOVOCAINE This action comedy about an ordinary guy (the suddenly everywhere Jack Quaid) who ca...

1995: Hey, remember when new, deadly viruses were the stuff of fiction? That was nice. Outbreak is about a lethal new virus that finds its way into America, and the team that works to find a cure before it spreads to the whole country. When COVID hit, the movie that really got brought into discussion was Contagion. And yeah, that's the more realistic depiction of this kind of scenario. Outbreak is much more of a classic big budget Hollywood thriller. It's actually kind of unusual that this came out in early March 1995, long before studios started regularly putting big films all over the calendar on a regular basis. You have director Wolfgang Petersen, in the middle of his prime run of big productions. You have big stars in Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, and because it's the 90s, Rene Russo. You also have rising stars in Kevin Spacey and Ciba Gooding Jr., who both are not the least bit problematic 😟 The film kind of goes into over the top action thriller mode i...

Baseball opening day is one of my favorite days of the year. It means the long winter is mostly over (although, hey, we had another pretty easy ride this time), and 6 months of ballgames await.  But I'm a Minnesota Twins fan, so opening day now also means the dawn of a new season of constant aggravation that most likely will end with zero postseason payoff. The annoyance is all the greater after a 2024 season that saw the Twins piss away all the franchise momentum they had gained after breaking the playoff win drought the year before. For the 2nd time in 3 years, they managed to turn a near certain playoff appearance into a complete collapse.  Same thing as always with this moribund franchise. Injuries and incompetence.  And the hatred of the Pohlads reached its zenith when they both cut payroll, and then it came out they were trying to sell the team, which is obviously why they cut it. They will never escape the Cheap Pohlads label. And then, in the offseason, we thought...