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In case you were wondering where Senator Ted Cruz stands on video game regulation, his approach is the same as his attitude toward mass shooting incidents at elementary schools in his state: It’s not his problem.

Now look, you’re probably thinking, “Why would anyone care what Ted Cruz has to say about gaming?” Yet really, “Why does anyone care what Ted Cruz has to say about anything?” The reality is that this guy, who fled the country for a Cancun vacation as Texas residents froze during a snowstorm and then blamed his poor choices on his pre-teen daughters, is a sitting United States senator and so, his opinion somehow holds weight.

On a recent episode of his podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz, the Republican congressman was quizzed on his stance regarding loot boxes in video games. Loot boxes are virtual treasure chests that can either hold cool in-game upgrades, like weapons, currency, and skins, or they can be duds. You can earn loot boxes through in-game play, or you can buy them with real money. The issue here, for some, is that the unpredictable nature of what’s inside a loot box makes buying them akin to gambling — they’re that proverbial box of chocolates Tom Hanks always warned us about — and parents don’t want kids gambling while playing video games. Is it an interesting issue? Sure. Is it one a Texas senator should be focusing on instead of addressing desperately needed gun regulation in his state after dozens of children were shot up at an elementary school? Nope.

Still, Ted Cruz has an opinion on all things — some other topics of conversation on his podcast include whether Elon Musk could beat Vladimir Putin in a fight, if “woke Disney wants kids to see lesbian toys smooch,” and “can America survive on windmills and unicorn tears?” (We say yes.) His attitude towards loot boxes is weirdly wishy-washy.

On the one hand, Ted gets annoyed with players who cheat by buying them instead of working hard in the game to earn upgrades. On the other, he doesn’t have six months to spend playing a game in order to earn rewards — he’s got beaches in Mexico to bronze on — so he admits to paying money to purchase them while playing.

“Now I’m something of a gamer,” Cruz confessed while clearing up his stance on video game regulation.”I’m not a gamer like hardcore Twitch streamers and I don’t do the massive multiplayer games. I’ll tell you, I don’t like it when you can buy in-game items and sort of make your character stronger or get advantages. Now I’ll confess when I play some games, I’ll sometimes buy it because it is more fun in some way. Your character has a lot more great stuff that would take you six months or a year to build up.”

So basically, loot boxes are bad unless Cruz wants to buy one, then it’s okay.

“I’m open to hearing arguments on this, but I approach the issue with a pretty strong libertarian bent,” Cruz continued. “I’d like to not see kids exploited and harmed, and so I’d be interested in his views, but at the same time, I’m not sure that the federal government really has a dog in the fight.”

Sounds like the same argument he’s used while fighting against gun control after a group of kids was massacred in his own state, but oddly enough, the loot boxes issue isn’t the weirdest pop culture take Cruz had during the show. He ended his video game musings by referencing one of his favorite genre films, Ready Player One. Apparently, Cruz gives the Steven Spielberg-directed disaster multiple rewatches a year — which should already call his judgment into question — and he thinks the virtual reality-addicted dystopia might be where all this loot box nonsense is heading.

“People amass money in virtual reality and it ends up for many people subsuming the world,” Cruz said while outlining the plot of one of his favorite movies. “There are hard challenges, and we’re not yet to the dystopian world of Ready Player One, but well, we might be on a path towards that.”

Again, this is a sitting United States senator.

(Via Vice)

After Game of Thrones’ controversial ending in 2019, HBO has been quick to promise fans that there would be more GOT content on the way. A lot more. The first will be House Of The Dragon, which will premiere later this summer featuring a star-studded cast donning long blonde wigs, accompanied by giant dragons.

HBO has released some more images from the highly-anticipated series, which will take place a few hundred years before the main GOT storyline fans all know and mostly love. The plot will be based on the Targaryen family and its complicated history before Daenerys is even born.

The new poster image features Emma D’Arcy as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen as she is backed by a massive Smaug-looking dragon. She is standing upon a bunch of familiar swords. And yes! They get their own Funko pops.

The series will star the former Doctor Who lead Matt Smith as prince Daemon Targaryen, who’s the younger sibling of well-respected King Viserys, played by Paddy Considine. The series is expected to provide some context to the complex family and their connection to the dragons. The cast also includes Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy, Rhys Ifans, Steve Toussaint, Eve Best, Fabien Frankel, and Sonoya Mizuno.

House Of The Dragon will premiere August 21st on HBO and HBO Max.

After years — years! — of searching, I’ve finally identified the crispiest, juiciest, most flavorful fried chicken sandwich I’ve ever tried. The search was not easy, it took a lot of research and by research I mean, it took a lot of trips through fast food drive-thrus and visits to expensive fast-casual restaurants. And while it was all delicious it was all, ultimately, for naught.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of great fast food chicken sandwiches out there. Ever since Popeyes’ sandwich entered the scene in the summer of 2019 every single fast food chain has revamped their own respective chicken sandwiches in the image of the GOAT. In 2022 and for the foreseeable future, if you love fried chicken sandwiches, you’re spoiled for choice.

But as good as the Popeyes chicken sandwich is, it’s not perfect. The bread is dry and flavorless, the sauce — whether you opt for mayo or the “spicy” version — is unimaginative, and the pickles are there, but they aren’t anything special. All the other fast food sandwiches have their flaws, too. So what is this magical and oh-so-tasty sandwich I’ve found? Well, it’s my own. Made from drawing certain elements from all my favorite chicken establishments and combining them.

Here’s my recipe:

PART I — The Recipe

The fried chicken sandwich is actually a pretty easy thing to make. That’s why it’s a fast food staple alongside the cheeseburger — you don’t need a lot of fancy ingredients to make a great one, you just need to balance unctuous and bright flavors and provide a crunchy, audibly pleasing bite paired with a tender and juicy mouthfeel.

For our recipe, I took aspects from all of my favorite fast food chicken sandwiches, the points of reference are as follows:

1. Buttermilk Marinade (Popeyes-inspired): As I was developing this chicken sandwich I tried brining it in pickle juice a’la Chick-fil-A but I didn’t like the results. I found buttermilk to give me the most tender end result. If you don’t have buttermilk use milk with a squirt of lemon juice or a splash of vinegar as a substitute (though your milk might curdle).
2. Batter (Shake Shack/Chick-fil-a): I hand-battered my chicken in a mix of flour, fresh cracked black pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder. For a spicy kick, I took a cue from Chick-fil-A’s spicy chicken sandwich and added some smoked paprika and cayenne pepper.
3. Brioche Bun (Crack Shack-inspired): A lot of sandwiches across the fast food universe utilize the brioche bun. It’s airy and buttery and less dense than a traditional sesame bun or a potato bun, allowing you to taste the meat more. If I had the skills I’d make my own, but for now, any small brioche bun from the market should work.
4. Sauce (Raising Cane’s-inspired): You can do mayo but I like a bit more flavor so for my sauce I took inspiration from Raising Cane’s famous Cane’s sauce. It’s your basic comeback-style sauce with a few twists.
5. Dill Pickles (Howlin’ Rays-inspired): Dill pickles give you that earthy and brine-y tang that all good chicken sandwiches have. Buy the best, freshest, crispiest pickles you can find.
6. Fresh Pepper (Jollibee-inspired): This is an underrated ingredient inspired by Jollibee’s delicious Spicy Chicken Sandwich. Jollibee uses jalapeño — I’m using serrano which is hotter. Feel free to sub in jalapeños if serranos are too hot but make sure they are fresh and not pickled.

Now let’s talk about the chicken…

PART II — Thigh or Breast?

I get it, the chicken sandwiches you’re used to are made with chicken breast and for whatever reason, some people seem to be scared of dark meat but… get over that. Aside from being a juicier and more flavorful piece of meat due to the higher ratio of fat, there are a lot of other advantages to choosing thighs over breasts.

First, thighs are smaller. A chicken breast is way too big for a chicken sandwich. Sure, you can filet a breast, and pound it flat, but then it takes up way too much area and far exceeds the bun (plus that becomes a schnitzel). I know, I know, I used to be team breast too — then I tried Crack Shack’s Firebird chicken sandwich.

Now I’ll never look back.

PART III — Ingredients:

Marinade:

• 1 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 1 pinch of Kosher salt
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper
• 4 cracks of fresh black pepper

Season your marinade. You’re going to taste the blend of spices more if the bird has seasoning on it before you dredge it. If you opt not to season the marinade (or forget to) add more seasoning to the flour mix itself.

Sauce:

• 1/2 cup of Kewpie mayo
• 1/4 cup of ketchup. In the picture is a packet of Hunts, I don’t like Hunts, I used Heinz but threw the bottle away after. Team Heinz!
• Garlic powder to taste (start with a teaspoon)
• Fresh black pepper to taste (start with four cracks)
• 1 teaspoon of Worcestershire Sauce
• 1/2 tsp of hot sauce (optional, any hot sauce will do, I used a Sriacha for some brightness)

Combine ingredients in a small bowl until well incorporated. Taste and adjust along the way, the best sauce you’ll ever have isn’t a recipe, it’s your recipe. Refrigerate overnight or at least one hour before serving.

This should yield enough sauce for two to four sandwiches (meaning you can save some sauce for fries!). There are several copycat Cane’s sauce recipes across the internet that read the same but none really come close to the savory magic that is the real thing. My guess is Cane’s uses a proprietary blend of seasonings. We can spend a whole week trying to figure that out or we could just use Kewpie mayo instead of whatever cheap brand Cane’s uses and we’ll be left with something altogether richer in flavor and much thicker and more luxurious, no special spice blend needed.

If you’re not familiar with Kewpie Mayo, it’s a Japanese style of mayonnaise that is made using egg yolks (rather than the whole egg-like American mayo) and rice vinegar and/or apple cider vinegar (rather than white vinegar). If you haven’t tried it yet, immediately remedy that for this recipe. Kewpie Mayo will change your life, it brings an umami-backed richness to mayo that’ll make you wonder why anyone in the world, even the staunchest mayo fans, ever bothered to eat something like Hellman’s when this savory godsend has been around since the 1920s.

Flour Mix:

• 1 cup of all-purpose flour
• 1 pinch of kosher salt
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp onion powder
• 3/4 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• 8 cracks of fresh black pepper

Whisk spices and flour together. Again, the above measurements are a ballpark. This should yield enough batter for two chicken sandwiches, whether you use breast or thigh. After the chicken has marinated for at least an hour — up to 24 — dredge the chicken through the flour and place it on a wire wack until frying.

Other Ingredients:

• Sliced Monterey Jack cheese
• Brioche Buns
• Dill Pickles
• Fresh Serrano (Or Jalapeño) Pepper
• Chicken Thigh/Breast

PART IV — Method

• Cut dill pickle into equal 1/4 inch slices, enough to cover your bottom bun.
• Thinly slice serrano pepper into wheels.
• Slice Monterey Jack (or use pre-sliced cheese if you like wasting money). Chick-fil-A’s Spicy Deluxe uses Pepper Jack, but I find that to be too earthy and dry compared to Monterey Jack which is creamier, nuttier, and just more interesting. Use pepper jack if you don’t have fresh peppers.
• Set aside.
• Dredge marinated chicken thighs in flour mix thoroughly, and set aside.

• Heat half a pan of neutral cooking oil in a cast-iron pan over medium-high heat (I used peanut, which Chick-fil-A uses, it’s not neutral but is one of the best cooking oil options for anything fried)

• Fry chicken until golden brown or about four minutes per side. Once flipped, spoon oil on top of the chicken to even browning. Chicken should be cooked to an internal temp of 165 Fahrenheit. Don’t do as I did and over-fry it, remember that the chicken will brown further after it is done cooking.
• Remove chicken from oil and place on a wire rack or baking sheet. I don’t have either so I threw mine on a napkin-lined plate.
• Place a slice of cheese immediately and evenly space out the peppers on top of the cheese.
• In a separate pan with butter, toast brioche buns.

• Once toasted, set aside and generously apply sauce to the bottom bun.
• Place pickles evenly across the bottom bun until the entire surface is covered.
• Add chicken and assemble the sandwich.

PART V — The End Result

If you used serranos prepare yourself to get smacked in the face with some serious heat. You should now be chomping on a chicken sandwich that is as every good chicken sandwich should be: tender, satisfyingly juicy, and audibly crunchy, but with this recipe, you’ll also find a lot more. Every bite is bursting, let me repeat, bursting with flavor — the breading will be well balanced between the earthy and distinct qualities of black pepper and the fragrant mix of onion and garlic powder with a smokey finish and a spicy kick. And that’s just the chicken.

When those flavors combine with the sumptuous and luxurious umami-packed sauce, the salty briny flavor of good pickles, and the fresh vegetal burst of serrano all wrapping it together it’s the closest thing your mouth will ever have to an orgasm. Popeyes who?

It was so good, I ate two back to back.

Though Conor Oberst made headlines last month for leaving Bright Eyes’ Houston show after performing just two songs, a pleasantly different outcome took place on The Late Late Show with James Corden. The indie band was full of energy as they offered a rousing performance of “Falling Out Of Love At This Volume.” Mike Mogis, Nate Walcott, and multiple other instrumentalists were also present for the set. James Corden was so pleased with the performance that he gave Oberst a big hug after it was completed.

The specific performance of “Falling Out Of Love At This Volume” is timely as the band started their “Companion” series in May, which includes a reissuing of their first three albums along with a few completely re-recorded new songs. These records come from the 90s when Oberst was just a teenager and part of the Omaha emo band Commander Venus alongside Tim Kasher, Todd Fink, and Matt Bowen. Conor Oberst felt that certain songs he made didn’t fit the Commander Venus’ sound, thus compiling them into A Collection Of Songs Written And Recorded 1995-1997, which ended up being the first Bright Eyes album released through Saddle Creek.

Check out Bright Eyes’ performance of “Falling Out Of Love At This Volume” above.

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. Nothing is harder to recreate than a joke, not to mention that these days, practically every project feels like the spiritual equivalent of a corporate executive banging a ladle against the sides of the slop trough somewhere, expecting that the sound alone will be enough to get us running and squealing.

I’m not immune to the pull of nostalgia myself, but there are also entire genres of shows that I’ve specifically avoided for the simple reason that I don’t think I could look myself in the mirror the next morning if I ever found myself getting excited about something called a “Baby Yoda.” Something about that feels a little too calculated. I know I’m a piggy. At least grant me the illusion of being a free-range piggy.

So how the hell did a Beavis and Butt-head movie released straight to streaming in 2022 wind up feeling so refreshing?

Beavis and Butt-head (has “Butt-Head” always had a hyphen? I feel like I’m being Mandela Effected here) began airing on MTV when I was nearing the age of its protagonists. It’s been… (*leans back in easy chair, quietly yearns for the release of death*) 25 YEARS since their last film effort, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, in 1996.

And yet, almost from the first frames, Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe feels not only like logical product, but something that should exist. In a weird way, Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe feels even more timely than their last movie. If that was a way to capitalize on the cartoon while its popularity was peaking, Mike Judge’s latest effort is a reminder of how comedy can be.

In the decades since Beavis And Butt-Head and Beavis And Butt-Head Do America, studios and culture broadly have assumed that the solution to comedy was more — more plot, more characters, more cameos, more dialogue. The pace of jokes has attempted to keep pace with the flow of information. Characters have gotten smarter, or at least more manic in order to keep pace. Maybe Beavis and Butt-Head’s glazed chuckling is a periodic reminder that you don’t need all that — a cyclical, necessary reaction to comedy whenever it gets too fancy, or takes itself too seriously, like waves of punk rock.

Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe is a movie about two horny teen dumbasses and their quixotic quest to one day score. They chuckle at anything that reminds them of sex, which is most things. That’s it, that’s the entire joke (the setup for it this time around occasionally involves NASA, a lady astronaut, the deep state, and the multiverse, but the punchline remains the same). And the longer Mike Judge (who writes, directs, and voices the leads) maintains it, the more I laughed.

Why does it feel so good to laugh at two dumbasses giggling at the word “butt?” If I could venture a guess — and this part is pure pontification on my part, because the simple, salient fact is that I laughed a lot at the two dumbasses laughing at the word butt — I think it’s because it asks so little of us.

Self-righteousness has been infecting comedy for years now, mostly as a rational response to an increasingly context-denying populace. At a certain point, audiences decided that they needed to know where everyone stood in the culture wars before they could laugh. This led to a fear of being taken out of context, of having sarcasm, satire, and wordplay excised from jokes and read as earnest sentiments. And that seeming death of context, nuance, and subtext forced many joke tellers into self-preservation mode, leading them to write themselves and their protagonists as, essentially, the heroes of every joke, the bringers of wisdom. It’s hard to even write a thing like this without it becoming a referendum on the value of that wisdom itself, but if we can be agnostic about that for a moment, comedy isn’t a great tool for educating the masses. It’s a great tool for taking the piss out of the teacher.

Building a comedy around two horny dipshits is a great way to do that. To be sure, Gen X squeezed the juice out of “it’s cool to not care” until its desiccated corpse spewed dry grey powder, but these days it feels like we’ve been living in the backlash to that for decades. We’re asked to care about everything, and the stakes could never be higher. It’s exhausting. In that context, it’s easy to enjoy two guys whose only concern is eating nachos and getting laid. (Yes, the premiere after-party did include a nacho cheese fountain).

Still, a throwback’s refreshing qualities can easily sour if it feels too much like an appeal to base nostalgia, which almost everything is nowadays. While Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe is anchored in a familiar vernacular (fartknocker, buttmunch, and so forth) it doesn’t feel nearly so propelled by a pathological need to stage callbacks as say, Top Gun: Maverick. And even more so than that overdue sequel, it benefits from protagonists who don’t age. Being cartoons is even more effective at staving off Father Time than being an insanely rich Scientologist, turns out.

There is a Cornholio scene that seems based on the premise of “hey, remember Cornholio?” but it moves the plot along well enough that it doesn’t feel too desperate. Likewise, even in scenes I wasn’t entirely sold on, a well-timed chuckle always seemed to pull me back. Mike Judge gets credit for concept often enough, but he also wields those chortles like a surgeon’s scalpel. The man is an artisan.

You could hear a pin drop during a scene when Beavis and Butt-head bumble into a gender studies seminar (with Tig Notaro voicing the professor, one of those voices I felt proud to instantly recognize) as the audience held our collective breath — would Mike Judge have a hot take? Would he accidentally out himself as a crypto-fash or another preachy lib from Hollyweird? Nope. The laughs came like sweet relief when the scene turned out to be mostly about how these two characters were far too simple to be engaging with any big or divisive ideas. And maybe that should be a lesson for a lot of people online.

What can I say? I loved Beavis and Butt-Head once, and I normally hate having my childhood fed back to me. Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe somehow didn’t feel like that. It felt like a slice of pure moronic bliss.

‘Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe’ premieres exclusively on Paramount+ June 23rd. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

Hip-hop’s various stan wars have created an odd climate online. You can be the biggest artist of the moment and fans can wonder whether or not you’re falling off at the same exact time. Take Cardi B, for instance. In 2020, just two years removed from the release of the most successful debut from a female rapper in the whole history of rap, she was fighting off rumors that she’d been shelved by Atlantic. This was literally one month into the media juggernaut that was “WAP” and just months before “Up” came along to return her to the top of the charts yet again.

It has been a while since the release of both monster hits, but it looks like Cardi isn’t going to let fans forget her accomplishments this time. Apparently, she’s been feeling a bit of pressure from impatient Bardi Gangsters who are pressed over waiting for new music after Cardi admitted to some “technical difficulties.” But rather than giving them time to crank up the rumor cycle, she returned with a reminder and a stern warning on Twitter, sharing a video compiling some of her past hits and promising that she’s going to go even harder.

“Just a little reminder feeling like 2020 when I had to come out and STEP to remind them,” she wrote. “P.S-IM GONNA STOMP THIS TIME AROUND.”

Check out Cardi’s reminder below.

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

With so much attention being paid to Thor’s butt and Christian Bale’s Uncle Fester-looking Gorr the God Butcher (seriously, it’s all I can see), let’s not overlook the biggest draw of Thor: Love and Thunder: Natalie Portman is back — in ripped form.

Director and writer Taika Waititi promised the Oscar-winning actress that she would have a less “boring” time in Thor: Love and Thunder than she did playing Jane Foster in the first two Thor movies. But to transform into the Mjolnir-wielding Mighty Thor, she had to get mighty ripped. “On Black Swan, I was asked to get as small as possible,” she told Variety. “Here, I was asked to get as big as possible. That’s an amazing challenge — and also state of mind as a woman.”

Portman worked with a trainer for 10 months to bulk up for the role, although there was some movie magic needed to make her seem as big as co-star Chris Hemsworth.

Another unexpected benefit for Portman to embracing her newfound sense of size has been watching others around her have to contend with it. Quite literally on Love and Thunder: Jane’s Mighty Thor stands six feet tall, and since there’s no healthy way yet for an actor to grow nearly 10 inches, the crew had to get creative to bring Portman to the proper height for scenes in which she walked with her co-stars.

Portman’s determination is no surprise to Kara Nortman, who co-owns the Angel City FC soccer team with the actress and activist. “I’m always telling Natalie she’s as much of an athlete as any of us,” she said. “I think of her as Thor every day.”

Thor: Love and Thunder comes out on July 8.

(Via Variety)

Despite the fact that Ozark ended its four-season run with an earth-shattering finale in April, Laura Linney, who played the Byrde matriarch Wendy, isn’t quite ready to let the series go.

Linney admitted that she actually hasn’t seen the finale of the show because it might taint her experience on the series, which she starred in alongside Jason Bateman and Julia Garner. “I haven’t seen it,” the actress said in a new interview with Vulture. “I don’t know what they chose. I’m very bad at watching myself and I’m particularly bad at watching things that I really loved doing because it’s going to change the minute I see it. I really can’t comment on it.”

Though she didn’t comment on the finale, she did mention that she has nothing but positive memories from the show, adding that she would “absolutely” be on board for another Ozark plot down the line, which the showrunners have hinted at in the past. “I’m having real withdrawal from Ozark,” Linney added. She had played the character for nearly five years, landing two Emmy nominations.

“Everything about it worked. All the right people were in the right positions. Everyone had a similar viewpoint. Everyone had a similar work ethic,” Linney added, saying that the crew had a special connection. “I loved being in Atlanta. It was an unbelievable crew. Crews on television normally do not stay intact. Ninety percent of our crew stayed the entire time. What that does on a set, the safety that you feel, the unspoken communication, the ease, the comfort, and the fun that you have — I feel like I just landed in a pot of honey. I miss it a lot.”

Not only does Linney miss the crew, but she also misses her character, who had a major transformation during the series. Linney admitted that Wendy was “very different” in the beginning. “I just remember she was snoring in the bed a lot. There was a lot of: Wendy snores. I just didn’t know where it was going to go.” She clearly developed a lot since the beginning.

Despite the unclear arch, Linney trusted that her character would get the development she deserved. “I don’t know why I trusted Jason Bateman and [showrunner] Chris Mundy as much as I did, but I remember saying to them, ‘I hope that if I sign onto this, you’ll use me. Otherwise, don’t cast me. Take someone else.’ There’s nothing worse than people not wanting what you have to offer. When people don’t want what you have to offer, it’s just womp-womp-womp.” Luckily, she offered a career-defining performance, which is really saying something, because she was also in The Truman Show.

(Via Vulture)

On May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old gunman walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 children and two teachers. We’re now nearly a month removed from the event and while many media outlets have moved on from the tragedy, Trevor Noah has not. On Tuesday night, The Daily Show host got angry about the latest details that have emerged in an investigation into the incident and the many ways the Uvalde Police Department—which, just days after the event, stopped cooperating with investigators—failed its citizens. Hell, even Tucker Carlson was livid! The police, Noah noted, have “been trying to block information about that day from coming out. And each time more information comes out, we learn why.”

On Tuesday, the first surveillance image from inside the school was released and what it showed painted a far different story from what police officials have claimed: The image, taken just 19 minutes after the gunman entered the school, shows multiple police officers inside the building, fully armed with at least one carrying a ballistic shield. This contradicts the school police chief’s statement that officers didn’t enter the school for nearly an hour because they weren’t properly armed. Noah was clearly appalled.

Every single time we learn something it gets worse and worse… Now we found out that they lied about not having enough weapons to go in. Because it turns out they had assault rifles, they had body armor, and ballistic shields. So I’m sorry, what else were they waiting for? The invincible star from Mario? What was that, huh? Get the f**k in the room! Like, how do they not go in? Which is, by the way, another thing we’ve learned.

They didn’t even try to get in the classroom. They didn’t even try. They told everyone that they had to wait for a key because the door was locked, but the door wasn’t locked. They just never tried to open it? Which is ridiculous. Even people waiting outside a locked bathroom at Starbucks will jiggle the handle after two minutes just to be sure sure. They’ll try. But it turns out these cops couldn’t do what it took the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park five minutes to learn. And you know what’s insane about this whole story is how the one time—the one time—it would have been appropriate to go in guns blazing, the cops decide to have a picnic outside. Yeah. But if you’re Black or you have a broken taillight, then all of a sudden they go all Rambo on your ass.

Ultimately, Noah concluded, the situation is Uvalde serves as just “another reminder that you can’t trust what the police say. This is one of the clearest reminders. Yes, they’re police. Yes, you respect them. But it doesn’t mean you just trust every single thing that they say.”

You can watch the full clip, beginning around the 5:35 mark, above.

Top Gun: Maverick has been shattering box office records left and right, so of course, theater exhibitors have nothing but love for Tom Cruise who personally fought Paramount and convinced the studio not to stream the highly anticipated sequel. That gamble paid off big time as Top Gun: Maverick has put up Marvel movie numbers since its Memorial Day weekend release. But Cruise isn’t done showing his love for the theatrical experience.

Despite just promoting Top Gun: Maverick in Korea, the actor flew into Barcelona for the latest CineEurope convention, where Cruise surprised the audience by making his second appearance in the past eight months. According to Deadline, the theater exhibitors “leapt to their feet” as soon as Cruise took the stage, and they definitely loved his message to them:

“I came here just to say thank you for everything… I know what it takes to do what you do… Thank you for allowing me to have the career I’ve had.” Somewhat reminiscent of what he said when he surprised CineEurope last October, Cruise continued, “I’m going to keep delivering these films for you… You know I’m here for you and I know you’re here for me.”

After thanking the audience again for its “help on Top Gun,” Cruise switched into ambassador mode and thanked them for helping “all movies.”

“I want everyone to win,” Cruise told the crowd. “I see a bright future for all of us.”

The actor concluded his speech by saying having theaters open “means the world to me,” and he promised to come back to the convention next year with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

(Via Deadline)