The Skolney Blog

1986: I'm not sure there is another film quite as quintessentially 80s as Top Gun. This film made a superstar, launched a major directing career, and added to one of the great producer runs of all time. I personally was very late in ever getting around to watching Top Gun. By the time I did, probably a good decade after it came out, I largely knew the movie through its brilliant parody Hot Shots. I mean, I still can't watch Top Gun without chuckling at some of the moments directly spoofed.  Tom Cruise had already had a couple of notable movies, but this was his first blockbuster smash, that cemented him as a major movie star. He's certainly given better performances, but he's so effortlessly good here as the cocky flyboy that it stuck as his screen persona for a long time. Tony Scott was almost a total unknown as a director, having made only 1 film to that point, but he was a perfect choice by producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Scott's style wa...

In theaters: MICHAEL Like almost every "controversial" movie these days that riles up the internet, Michael is really neither good enough nor bad enough to be worth all the fuss. The good: Both actors playing Michael are good. Some of the recreations of performances are enjoyable. A handful of scenes actually try to make us understand Michael as a person. The bad: Even if you don't know anything about the production, it has a veneer of inauthenticity. And it's so uncreative, just following the biopic formula every step of the way. MORTAL KOMBAT 2 I remembered virtually nothing about the original of this rebooted franchise from a few years ago, but I don't think that mattered much. This is a to the point movie that delivers a bunch of crazy fights and some wild kills.  IN THE GREY The ever prolific Guy Ritchie's latest, a way too convoluted thriller about covert ops and Middle Eastern bad guys and a bunch of stuff that I didn't follow. Worth it mostly for a...

Guess what, everyone! A new Star Wars movie is here! Which means only one thing anymore: CULTURE WAR!!!! Yes, because no franchise (not even Marvel) has become more of an object for internet fandoms to whine and argue about incessantly, often for political reasons. Yes, how DARE a franchise that began as a Vietnam allegory and featured bad guys called "stormtroopers" insert anything even vaguely political into its product! I loathed the discourse around the prequels back in the day, but at least that was mostly left to the films themselves. The Disney Star Wars era has proven that the prequel era was not an outlier. Star Wars fans exist to bitch. They hate everything. If it came out after 1980, it is shit. And now in this era we have all the added whining from the deplorables, the ones who hold extra disdain for all things Star Wars now that there were projects fronted by women, or prominently featuring any non-straight white male 100% of the time. And when the overseer of al...

Just over 2 weeks ago, Minnesota sports had one of the coolest nights we have ever had, a truly unique convergence of teams and stakes, with the Timberwolves and Wild both clinching 1st round playoff series wins at home. But the problem with winning in the 1st round is that you then have a 2nd round. Never before had the Wolves and Wild both advanced in the same year. Could they do it again and against superior competition?  Well, this IS Minnesota sports. Even when we DO get some playoff success (Minneapolis Miracle, the Twins 2023 wild card win), it doesn't sustain itself. And in the span of 3 days this week, the championship-less (hell, finals appearance-less) Wolves and Wild were once again brushed aside, so some other team that isn't from Minnesota can win a championship. Each found their own way to add to our state's big 4 misery. The Wild, in the 2nd round for the first time since 2015, faced the Colorado Avalanche, league leaders in points, and generally believed to...

Every other major sports market gets these days at least somewhat regularly. Forget titles, just advancing in the playoffs. Many get this joy through multiple teams.  Not us.  Minnesota is a cursed sports market, a reality that becomes more and more of a burden through every season of unfulfilled expectations and misplaced hope, and absurd circumstances that lead to losses. There was little reason to think the last night of April would be any different. But there was a wrinkle this time, a very rare coincidence of scheduling that had both the Timberwolvea and the Wild at home, both playing a game 6 up 3-2, and thus both in position to advance to round 2 in their respective marathon playoffs. The Wild had the more hopeful situation, since they were healthy. The Wolves, man, they were already down Anthony Edwards and Donte DiVincenzo, and then we found out Ayo Dosunmu was going to be out too. How were the Wolves possibly going to get this done? The Wolves game had some reasonabl...

1996: The 80s and 90s were the glory days of the pulpy, often sleazy studio thriller. But they were all starring adults and dealing with adult things. We youths needed our own version, and we got it with Fear, a real blast of a movie. This is teen Fatal Attraction. Innocent high school girl Reese Witherspoon falls for the initially nice older guy, Mark Wahlberg, but then to the surprise of no one he turns out to be a total psycho, in those ways that only movie villains ever are. This movie could easily veer into total trash, but it has a lot going for it. It was made by a legitimate director, James Foley, who had made Glengarry Glen Ross just a few years earlier. I really like the Pacific Northwest setting. I really like how the parents (William Petersen and Amy Brenneman) are fleshed out as actual people.  The casting was really canny. Wahlberg had begun to get into acting, but was still mostly known as Marky Mark, and we had a year to go before Boogie Nights. His care...

In theaters: THE DRAMA Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are about to get married, but then a dirty secret gets revealed. I mostly enjoyed this movie, despite the fact that I had a hard time buying the aforementioned secret would make anybody on screen act the way they do.  FACES OF DEATH Not so much a remake of the infamous original as a meta sequel. It's alright. I saw it for the inimitable Barbie Ferreira, who is good in it. Movie ends up following some standard slasher beats.  LORNE Entertaining documentary about Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. They got just about everybody to go on camera and talk about him, and some of the best parts are the former cast members just cracking jokes.  MOTHER MARY The latest A24 oddity stars Anne Hathaway as a troubled pop star trying to get her estranged friend and dressmaker (Michaela Coel) to make her an outfit for a special performance. I was kind of intrigued by the first half of this, which gave off Phantom Thread vibes. B...

The 2026 Vikings draft was unlike any in their history. It was conducted without a set GM, since that position has not been filled after the somewhat surprising firing of Kwesi Adofo-Mensah a few months ago. Cap genius Rob Brzezinski was the main man for this draft, I suppose auditioning for the full-time job.  I think he made himself a true contender with the work he did over the 3 days. But I guess I'm in the minority, because for 3 days it was just bitch bitch bitch nonstop from most Vikings fans. The bitching began in round 1, when the Vikings took Caleb Banks, a DT, instead of perhaps a safety. Banks has had some injury issues that knocked his stock down a bit, but if healthy he can be an amazing talent at a position of even greater need than safety. But fans were irate we drafted Banks  cause none of the godly mocks had predicted he would be the pick. Day two was also packed with the potential for immediate impact. In the 2nd round we took Jake Golday, a playmaking lineb...

Reds 7 Twins 4 10 innings Well, what was your favorite "The 2026 Minnesota Twins are above .500" moment?  A homestand that began with the Twins blasting the Red Sox and briefly having the best record in the AL concluded Sunday with the Twins choking away another game to the Reds and getting swept out of Target Field.  The good vibes are gone.  Sunday's game was virtually a rerun of Saturday. The Twins lead most of the game, then the bullpen blows it in the end. Bailey Ober had a really good start, going 6+ with 1 run allowed and 10 strikeouts. The lineup scratched across a few runs. It looked like that would be enough to avoid the sweep and split the homestand. The Twins demolished and yet to be rebuilt bullpen has been much discussed. They've already reached into AAA for reinforcements, and one of them, Andrew Morris, pitched a scoreless 8th. Then Derek Shelton sent him back out for the 9th, and...oh boy. Morris gave up a pair of singles to open the inning, then afte...

The WNBA has entered a new world, of fatter contracts and expansion teams. And it's TEARING ME APART!  Well, okay, I'm fine, but it has been quite a week and change for Lynx fans like myself.  It started with the expansion draft. I hated how they did this before free agency, cause the Lynx (as did all teams) had to protect players who were actually free agents. I still don't really understand it.  The 1st pick to the Portlan Fire was Bridget Carleton. I figured she was gone anyway, and she did have a disappointing 2025, but I was still sad to see her go.  The Toronto Tempo (atrocious name) took Maria "Masha" Kliundikova from us.  Then, the actual free agency came, and it was a bloodbath of departures. Alanna Smith to Dallas. Jessica Shepard to...also Dallas. Natasha Hiedeman to Seattle. Dijonai Carrington to Chicago. Everybody was leaving. I get that this was the 1st chance for these players to get the kind of money they got. Lan and Shepard got max deals. I get...

TWINS 13 RED SOX 6 My 1st Twins game of 2026 was to see a ballclub that entered the game with the best record in the American League. But it wasn't the Red Sox.  Somehow, the Twins, who entered 2026 with rock bottom expectations, and then began to live up to them with a largely listless 3-6 start, swept a 4 gamer from Detroit and took 2 of 3 in Toronto heading into Monday's game. And yes, that made them a modest 9-7, which tied them with Cleveland for the best in the league.  Make it 10-7, after the most stunning win of the young season, a demolition of Sox ace Garret Crochet. The Twins' resurgent bats began teeing off right away. 4 hits, a walk, an HBP, and an error led to a 4 run 1st.  The 2nd was even more of a bloodbath, with a bases loaded Josh Bell double, a 3 run Victor "The Great" Caratini homerun, and then a Ryan Kreidler solo shot as the cherry on top. Finally, Crochet was pulled. At 11-0, I was hoping the Twins would set a new record for most runs score...

1996: The 90s was a golden age of movies made in Minnesota. My personal favorite is Beautiful Girls, but a movie being made here at the same time is pretty much the unquestioned most significant film of the era. Fargo, written and directed by local boys Joel and Ethan Coen, is widely acclaimed as one of the best films of the decade. Somehow, I didn't see this in theaters, at least not at the time (I did see a 25th anniversary screening). I have no idea how that happened. I knew the Coens. The movie got a lot of attention. Siskel and Ebert raved about it. The very beginning of the movie says it's based on a true story. It's not, but that's the kind of thing you could still get away with in 1996. It's a whole complicated kidnapping plot, where William H. Macy hires a pair of crooks (Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife, to ransom money from his father in law. Everything goes haywire, and people die, and in comes police chief Frances McDormand ...

In theaters: WUTHERING HEIGHTS Emerald Fennell started the decade with the great Promising Young Woman, but that's starting to look like a bit of a fluke. She no doubt takes a big swing with this film, and it's not some standard stuffy literary adaptation. But it is entirely a style over substance situation, and at well over 2 hours, it becomes quite dull. Margot Robbie tries.  THE BRIDE Speaking of a big swing by a female director that winds up way more style over substance, we have Maggie Gyllenhaal's Frankenstein movie. Jessie Buckley is a wonderful, now Oscar winning actress. But the wild overacting she does in this is just not in her wheelhouse. It's a film that occasionally comes to life (ha ha), but too often is just obnoxious.  READY OR NOT: HERE I COME Really liked the original Ready Or Not, one of those movies that makes it look easy. This belated sequel goes the John Wick route, expanding the lore in a big way. I'm not sure this is a case where the lore i...

1976: I may be old, but there's a whole history of film that took place before I was born. Even to this day, I have not seen a whole lot of what are considered the greatest films made, if they came out prior to 1979.  There ARE some films made before then that I am a big fan of, and often my go-to choice as my favorite film that existed before me is Martin Scorsese's 1976 masterpiece Taxi Driver. I think I might have actually watched this for the first time in my college film class. Before that, I knew the basics. I knew the "you talking to me" scene. I knew Jodie Foster played a teenage prostitute. In arguably his most famous role, Robert Deniro is Travis Bickle, a New York City cab driver, roaming the streets of that seedy, dangerous 70s New York. He appears like a decent enough guy on the outside, but he's an isolated person with no family and no close friends.  The episodic film finds him attempting a romance with Cybill Shepard, but their first re...