The Skolney Blog

1985: I'm not sure what movie held the title of my favorite prior to the 90s. But Back To The Future would have definitely been in the discussion. It was for sure one of the movies I had watched the most.  I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said before, but BTTF is pretty close to a perfectly constructed film. Premise and execution are just in peak form.  Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) time travels back to 1955 and has to make sure his parents still meet and fall in love or he'll never be born. But his teenage mom (Lea Thompson) has the hots for him. And when 80s Lea Thompson is there, I mean, I would have conflicts.  BTTF is a great sci-fi movie, and a great comedy. It's loaded with iconic quotes. For 1985, the fx work really holds up. The score is one of the best of all time.  Perfectly cast. I was recently horrified to find out I am nearly the same age as Christopher Lloyd was when he made this movie.  The movie taught me what a sequel was. I w...

In theaters: JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH Well I'll be!  After more than 30 years, and various failed sequels and a shaky reboot, we at long last have a Jurassic franchise movie that is genuinely very good again. No qualifiers are needed. Why does this one work? Well, for one thing it at least some of the time treats the dinosaurs again as objects of awe and wonder, and not just as scary monsters. But it really nails the big set pieces, including an absolute dandy involving a T-Rex and a raft.  The movie definitely follows a lot of the beats of the 1993 film, but does so extremely well. Cast is pretty good, led by a charismatic and, yeah, super hot Scarlett Johansson, who gets a rare chance to just be a fun movie star.  Great job, Gareth Edwards.  MATERIALISTS I'm not sure what happened here. Director Celine Song made the sensitive, moving Past Lives a couple of years ago, and now returns with another romance-based film that is anything but sensitive, and only moves me to...

Red Sox 8 Twins 5 I wasn't even gonna do a game blog for this one, cause what is there to say about the Twins? They have sunk into oblivion following the all-star break, losing 6 of 9, including two series losses to last place NL teams. It's made it very clear that there is no playoff push coming. So on Monday, the Twins began the sell-off, shipping Chris Paddack and Randy Dobnak (yes he was still in the org) to the Tigers. That closed the book on the horrible Paddack-Pagan trade that we gave up Brent Rooker in. Rooker is an all-star masher for the A's, and no I don't care that he bounced around a couple teams before getting there. And the idiotic Dobnak extension was just a waste of time, as the Twins paid MLB money to a player who barely got above AAA since. But whatever. Hug Watch continued into Tuesday night's game against Boston.  Paddack was the original starter, and in his.place the Twins called up Pierson Ohl for his major league debut. Always neat to see a ...

The Fantastic Four is one of the biggest comic properties out there. Even if you don't know comics, you have at least heard of the characters. Every other such character has yielded at least one very good movie. But the FF has had trouble. I am actually a fan of the two movies from the mid-2000s, with Chris Evans and peak Jessica Alba. They were pretty successful movies, but critics hated them, and nobody seemed too put out when the franchise ended after two movies. And the MCU started a year later, and Evans would never have been Captain America if FF had continued.  Much worse was the attempted reboot in 2015, by which point the non-MCU Marvel films were really struggling. This one was a dark, boring version of the FF characters, and wasted an actually very good cast. By the time that movie came out and bombed, everybody was pretty much just sitting and waiting for Marvel Studios to get control of the property back and make a really good Fantastic Four film. Well, that time has a...

Twins 12 Pirates 4 The Twins have just about reached the all-star break, in what has been an extremely middling, mediocre season. Aside from a 13-game win streak in May, it has been a season of underperforming players, injuries, and little hope for the season becoming much of anything.  Too bad, because we are finally getting to see the absolute best of Byron Buxton. And on Saturday, he had the absolute best game of his absolute best season, going 5 for 5 and hitting the 1st cycle in Target Field history. And on his bobblehead day, no less.  The mystery of who would actually win the game was dispensed with pretty quickly. A Kody Clemens 3 run bomb started the scoring in a 6 run 2nd. 3 more were added in the 3rd. By this point, Buxton was 3 for 3 and had everything but the homerun. The Twins did the old bullpen game thing, starting with Cole Sands and then moving to Travis Adams, who wound up getting his 1st career with. The last place Pirates never made it a game. Buxton added...