The Skolney Blog

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...

In theaters: SHELTER The latest Jason Staham movie is generic even by his standards (this is half Safe, half Beekeeper), but it's an okay watch.  SEND HELP Sam Raimi's super entertaining dark comedic thriller where mousy office worker Rachel McAdams and her douchebag boss Dylan O'Brien crash land on a deserted island. The comedy is very funny, led by McAdams in the kind of full bloom, going for it movie star performance she has been so rarely afforded.  GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON'T DIE My favorite film of the year to this point, a super creative, weird, wacky time travel sci-fi comedy. A well cast Sam Rockwell leads a cool ensemble that also has Zazie Beetz and the always terrific Haley Lu Richardson. This thing is like 12 Monkeys if it was made by the Rick and Morty team. Shockingly, it was directed by Gore Verbinski, a filmmaker who has been doing big projects for over 20 years, but few I have liked at all.  CRIME 101 We used to get these big star-driven crime movies a ...

2026 marks 30 years since the original Scream movie came out. The first two in particular are core texts for me as a film fan. I can not imagine the late 90s without them. The franchise has mostly had ups. Scream 3, not so good, but also not unwatchable. Figured that was the end of things, but then Scream 4 came a decade or so later. It was very good, but it wasn't that successful, so you figured maybe that was the end of the line for the franchise. But then another decade passed (as did Wes Craven), and we got a new creative team who delivered a pair of really good new sequels, mixing old and new cast. Scream 6 even managed without Neve Campbell. It's been a few years again, but now we get Scream 7, and boy has it arrived with people mad at it. The team behind 5 and 6 mostly bailed, and breakout star, the magnificent Melissa Barrera, was fired due to social media posts. Even with Campbell back as Sidney, and original franchise creator Kevin Williamson also back as co-writer, a...

My 25th anniversary post Not much to add. Just another layer of "I can't believe X movie is this old" We're now seeing 30 year anniversaries of movies that came out when I was in the 2nd half of high school. It's sometimes hard to accept that I have gotten this far out from those years and gotten this damn old. Which, I guess, makes me relate to the characters in this movie that much more. 

In theaters: ANACONDA I'm not sure if this is a reboot or a sequel or what. What I do know is that it's an odd artifact, a comedy so self-referential that it reveals a much better movie that was sitting right there. Why not just have Jack Black and Paul Rudd play themselves?  WE BURY THE DEAD Presented as a zombie movie but far more of a drama with zombie stuff in it. I found it somewhat boring, but when Daisy Ridley is your lead, your movie can never be unwatchable.  SONG SUNG BLUE Liked this a whole lot more than I expected. The true-ish story jukebox musical about a Neil Diamond tribute band, with the typically good Hugh Jackman and the borderline revelatory (and now Oscar nominated) Kate Hudson. Where the hell was THIS Kate Hudson the last 20 years? The parts of the film centered on the music are across the board fun (even if I hate the people who do the "SO GOOD SO GOOD" thing). The critical event that happens halfway through (and which did happen in real life) t...

1996: For many of us burgeoning film fanatics in the 90s, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction was a core text. It made him our idol.  But there was another movie, one not directed by Tarantino, that was almost as big a deal to me, and that was From Dusk Til Dawn. This movie was a collaboration between Tarantino and fellow up and coming director Robert Rodriguez. Tarantino had just appeared in Rodriguez's Desperado, and done a little script work, too. Desperado was cool, so it was clear Rodriguez was on his way, too. FDTD was a very highly anticipated movie for me. I actually saw this twice in theaters. First, I convinced my mom to take me. That, uh, got a little awkward. Then I saw it with a couple similarly film geeky friends. I technically wasn't even 17 yet, so I don't know how I got in. This is a film that any 16 or 17 year old is certain to be intoxicated by. Violence, gore, nudity, it's all there.  The trailer made no secret that this becomes a vampir...

The Top 20 Best Films: 1. One Battle After Another The overwhelming frontrunner to win Best Picture, and deservedly so. Paul Thomas Anderson's best film since Magnolia. A funny, tense, passionate film with bravura filmmaking and an incredible cast.  2. Bob Trevino Likes It I watched this on streaming again just to make sure. Yep, cried again. An unbelievably sweet, empathetic film that nobody saw (but I kinda like that the film feels mine). Wonderful performances by the inimitable Barbie Ferreira and the never better John Leguizamo. 3. Thunderbolts One of the best MCU films this decade. Great ensemble, led by the peerless Florence Pugh, and touching on issues that you never see in a comic book film.  4. Sinners Ryan Coogler cashes in on his franchise successes with a massively entertaining and richly detailed drama that then turns into a fantastic vampire movie.  5. Predator: Badlands My favorite film in the series, which I never would have expected.  6. Mission Impo...