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The Nintendo Switch is a neat little console. Never before have we seen a device with that level of power and portability. It is a console where players can play games like Skyrim, NBA 2K, and Mario anywhere they want. Ten years ago, that would have sounded crazy, but now, it’s completely reasonable.

Of course, with it being the holiday season, we’re all looking for ways to make traveling a little easier. That’s why those who have a Switch are in luck. It is the perfect console to take on a flight, a long drive, or just to keep yourself sane around the in-laws. You just need the right games, and luckily for those who own the console, the Switch has a strong library of games that should keep anyone entertained for as long as they want. These are the best Nintendo Switch games to have in your collection while traveling this holiday season:

Pokémon

Pokémon is an easy choice. With the recent release of Shining Pearl and Brilliant Diamond, there are some new games to enjoy. Want games that aren’t just a remake of the fourth generation? Give Sword and Shield a try! There is plenty of Pokémon available on the Switch to sink dozens of hours into defeating gyms or becoming a Pokémon master. This is also a great choice for anyone that is visiting, or traveling, with children. Pokémon is great for all ages and kids will get just as much entertainment out of it as adults.

Shin Megami Tensei V

Sometimes you just get an aching to play a JRPG. You want to scroll through menus, dive into an overly elaborate plot with religious subthemes, explore fictional versions of Tokyo, and clock in a solid 80 hours of game time, minimum. If any of this sounds like an appealing way to spend the holidays, then there is no better game to play on the Switch than Shin Megami Tensei V. The Shin Megami Tensei franchise is a collection of very popular JRPG’s known for their difficulty and dungeon crawling aspects. Not only that, but the stories are usually really well told and worth the price of admission alone. If you’ve ever played a Persona game before, this is the franchise from which it all originated. These games are really good. Be ready to sink in many hours.

Metroid Dread

A contender for Game of The Year, Metroid Dread is the first new 2D Metroid game since 2002’s Metroid Fusion. It even continues the plot from where Fusion left off. The game received praise for being a really fun Metroid game and being kinda scary. It has really fun combat and is a ton of fun to explore, which is important for any game in the Metroid universe, but hiding in the hallways Samus explores are creatures called E.M.M.I that can end her life very quickly. They are a challenge to defeat and will, more often than not, require running away. That’s where the dread of Metroid Dread comes in. This game can be a surprise scare sometimes, so maybe keep this one for when you’re on a plane and not around kids.

Luigi’s Mansion 3

Those who are looking for a spooky game that isn’t quite so scary should give Luigi’s Mansion 3 a spin. The latest adventure starring Mario’s brother features him sucking up ghosts in a haunted hotel with his trusty Poltergust 3000. While this might sound spooky, the game is very lighthearted with most of the ghosts being more comedic than scary. The best part of this game is that it doesn’t take too long to beat, so it can be finished in a handful of long plane rides, and it has a very fun co-op mode. Bring it along with you and let your nephew or cousin play. It’s one of those games that fits any holiday situation.

Death’s Door

We’ve written before about how good Death’s Door is. Death’s Door is challenging but fair, and so addictive that you might be surprised at how fast time goes by while you’re playing. It’s hard to attach it to a particular genre — many people like to compare it to games like Dark Souls, but it accomplishes what it’s trying to do incredibly well. The plot of the game is interesting enough to push you forward, but the true fun is figuring out the best way to fight your way through each combat scenario. It’s only $20 and it’s arguably the best game on this entire list. While we think it’s great to play on the go, it’s a good enough game that it should be played anytime.

One of the funnier (or at least less depressing than Tom being called the “Christmas Tree” because people are hanging crimes off him — which is still pretty funny) storylines in season three of Succession is Greg suing Greenpeace. As our own Brian Grubb helpfully recapped, “Greg is not getting any inheritance because his grandfather is giving the fortune to Greenpeace, but someone wrote a comment about it that Greenpeace promoted, so now Greg is considering suing Greenpeace for defamation.”

First off, Succession: what a great show. Also, Greenpeace and Nicholas Braun, who plays Greg on the HBO series, are acting out the fictional plot in real life.

“Hey @nicholasbraun, we heard Cousin Greg wants to sue Greenpeace. Might want to take a look at this before he does,” Greenpeace UK tweeted, along with a link to a list of reasons why you, whether you’re the grandson of a cranky billionaire or an imaginary dead cat-carrying lackey, should leave a gift in your will to Greenpeace:

From our beginnings as a small group of activists protesting against nuclear testing off the coast of Alaska, Greenpeace has grown into a global movement for change. Today, for the millions of people who believe in a cleaner, greener, more peaceful planet that can sustain us all, we are the world’s most effective environmental campaigning organization, and a beacon of hope… Leaving a gift in your Will to Greenpeace is a way to keep putting your beliefs into action, long after your lifetime. Any gift that you choose to leave, large or small, will support our work for years to come.

Braun’s reply:

He’s been spending too much time with Logan.

(Via Greenpeace)

After years of demanding that art movies show full penetration, one finally has: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a feature out of Romania from director Radu Jude. My long-running joke suggestions aside, Bad Luck Banging isn’t a joke. In fact it’s Romania’s submission for best foreign language film at this year’s Oscars.

Yet just because Bad Luck Banging is a serious piece of art doesn’t mean it isn’t funny. Telling the story of Emi, played by Katia Pascariu, a teacher who has had her homemade sex tape with her husband leak online — which we see almost in its entirety at the beginning of the film — the film is broken into three parts. In the first, Emi runs a series of errands around the city of Bucharest, shot guerrilla style in the midst of COVID, which is ever-present, all with the news that the video is out there and some of her work colleagues have seen it and that there’s going to be a meeting about it hanging over her head.

In part three, we actually see that meeting, a slightly absurdist comedy of manners that feels like something out of Curb Your Enthusiasm, with representatives of different facets of society (a priest, a soldier, an intellectual, a prudish mom, etc.) reacting to the video’s existence in various ways. At one point, they all watch the tape again on a monitor framed next to Emi’s face.

Part two of the film is a pastiche-style series of historical facts about Romania, definitions of terms, along with aphorisms and mini jokes (a few of which are also sexually explicit). This section, while also occasionally very funny, communicates very clearly that this is overtly an attempt at art. So rarely do art films and sex comedies coexist that combining them is a kind of revelation unto itself. Though Jude’s purpose here is clearly much bigger than mere juxtaposition: touching on issues of art, sex, commercialism, and Romania’s complicated history of socialism, revolution, racism, the church, and the Holocaust.

That Jude thought he could successfully combine all these things makes him a man after my own heart (there’s nothing worse to me than the strain of American intellectualism that acts as if sex is something you read about in the New Yorker). Naturally, I had lots of questions. I spoke with Jude via Zoom from Bucharest this week.

—

Are you joining us from Bucharest? Is it getting cold there now?

Not real cold. It’s like 11 degrees (Celcius — about 52 degrees Fahrenheit). So it’s quite reasonable, but I think in one week, it will start a real winter. Probably without snow for a while, but quite cold. Actually, Bucharest is horrible. The winters are very harsh, because it’s plains. So it’s a lot of winds coming from the east from Russia, and it’s sometimes minus 20, something like that. And the summers are extremely hot, so it’s really quite nasty in both ways.

So obviously this film has some explicit sex scenes. Did you choose to do that all non-simulated? All your actors, are they doing their real stunts?

That’s good. Yes, they did their own stunts, their own sexual stunts. It’s interesting, I think these questions, the more you go from Eastern Europe to Western Europe and to the United States, these questions appear more often. I think most of the American press ask this question, how it was done. Somebody asked if we had an intimacy coordinator. Like it’s the kind of rule now, but we don’t have. The Romanian industry is so small. Whenever you do a thing or two which are different, you don’t have anybody to rely on because there’s no real industry, and most of the people, technicians or stuntmen or prop men and so forth, learn their trade, if they’re older, either in the socialist film studios, but people who are under 60 now, let’s say, learn their trade from American movies that were shot in Romania. I also worked for a lot of films as assistant director 20 years ago, even moreso it was a kind of exploitation, because we were cheap labor, of course. And we worked more than the unions would accept probably in United States. But it was also a good school, because you could learn a lot of things.

In this case, actually, it was quite simple, because Katia Pascariu is quite open. From our first meeting, I think she was the first to say, “Look, I read the script. I don’t have a problem with this first scene. I don’t have a problem with nudity. I know I can go all the way.” And I said, “Well, at least let’s do the penetration scene with a double.” So the husband in the video is a professional porn actor, Stefan Steel, steel like the metal, with obvious meaning, I think. Very self-confident, as you could see from the name. And for the penetration shots we replaced Katia with a porn actress.

So before it even started, she was like, “Yeah, I’m okay with all of this. You don’t need to worry about it?”

Yes, and I don’t know how it is in the US, but in Romania, which is a pretty conservative and prudish society… Because since we don’t have a big film industry, all actors in Romania are doing film and theater at the same time. There’s no film actors like in countries with a real film industry. And they have this mystique, many of them, like this artistical act of being something extremely important and extremely… almost mystical, you know? So while films are considered a little bit more vulgar, and sometimes if you ask an actor to appear naked or an actress — and I don’t judge that, I mean, I accept everybody’s right to do things or not to do them, but sometimes there are actors saying, “No, I’m playing Shakespeare, I’m playing Chekhov, I’m playing Ibsen, and now you ask me to fuck in a bed or to be naked? No, I refuse that.”

I remember when I was very, very young, I wanted to do a short film and to have an actress, an old, not very well-known, but an actress, she worked in the National Theater. And I sent her the script. She was at that time, I think around 60-years-old, and in the script said she’s supposed to be like a housewife cooking or something in a kitchen. And she called me and said, “How dare you offer me to be a housewife cooking in a kitchen, I want to play a star!” Or I don’t know, something else, a princess, a queen, but not a housewife. So this gives you probably an idea of how difficult is to find, sometimes, actors open to this kind of thing. So this was even more brave for Katia. But Katia and many other young actors, I think there’s a bit of changing in the morals now and perspectives, because Katia belongs to a group that makes political theater and independent theater, and she’s… she’s not, you know, square.

Are those conversations hard for you to have as a director, where you have a vision of what you want out of your film, but then you have to ask actors to be more open or put aside vanity and things like that? Is it weird to feel like you’re having to convince people to do things that they don’t want to?

Oh, yes and no, I don’t know. I try to have these discussions at the beginning in the casting session. For instance, there was an actor that was supposed to do a dirty word, and he said, “You know, I belong to a religious group, and I’m not supposed to say this word. So I’m sorry, either you change the word or I quit.” And I didn’t change the word and he quit. But I think this is okay, as long as it doesn’t happen on the set.

Though I have to be honest, I had a kind of disappointment, because the last scene in the film, the third ending, which is like an oral sex simulated thing [on a dildo -Ed.], there were actors and actresses who all knew the script in advance. And I explained it to all of them, and then suddenly on the last day of shooting they said “No, I don’t do this. I don’t want to do it.” And I felt, you know, quite… because in the end I didn’t know how many of these shots I would need for the editing. So I felt a little bit uncomfortable, because there were actresses saying, “I’m not doing such a thing.” That was the expression, “I’m not doing such a thing!” So that was not very elegant, because it was… Well, things happen.

The character of Emi, she goes through this ordeal where they’ve seen her do the sex tape, and then the conversation is sort of, “how can we take you seriously as a teacher after this?” Is there any of that that would apply to Katia after having done this role performing in the same video?

No, I don’t think so. Well, we should ask her, but… What she does in her professional life, I don’t think is affected by that. But there is a fear like that in the actors. Sometimes actors say, “You know, I don’t do that. Not because I wouldn’t do it, but because my colleagues will judge me.” But that, I think, as not only applied to Romania, I think there’s always a kind of fear in every department of a film crew — a fear of, a kind of reluctance, to do things in a way which are not necessarily traditionally considered “well done.” Like if you ask a director of photography sometimes to do a shot which doesn’t have the best composition but you want it like that, sometimes the DP can say, “Look, but what my colleagues will say? They will say that I will be bad DOP because of that.” It’s always a resistance to change something. And I felt that quite strongly in myself as well, because sometimes when I had an idea to try something quite unorthodox after I have the enthusiasm to go into that direction, I say, “Oh my God, but what if is a stupid idea? And what if it’s wrong?” And I don’t know.

So Romania chose your film to be their submission in the foreign-language category at the Oscars. Oftentimes it seems like the movies that countries choose are often these very serious, very bleak, very dramatic films, and yours is sort of wry and comedic and raunchy. Are Romanians just cooler about the idea of comedy being an artistic product?

Well, I think it’s a bit something else, a question of luck. Because, I don’t know how, I think every country has different rules about how they choose, but in Romania, there is an association of critics that each year puts five people in charge of that. So it depends who this commission is. And in this case, there were three young critics who were in favor of this film, and this is how it ended up there. I’m sure many people are not very happy about that.

I was happy about it.

Well, me too. I think it’s a good sign, because sometimes a film, sometimes a cultural artifact, a work of art, is also a test for the society in a way. I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the film and to say, “Oh, I’m so important to test the society.” But sometimes there is, at least in some part of the society, there is a test of seeing how they react to that, how the authorities react to this, how mentalities react to that. So yes, I’m happy, not only for the film, but for the fact that Romania and this commission somehow made this choice.

In the first segment of the movie, your main character, Emi, she’s kind of walking from place to place around the city. It seemed like you’re trying to give this sort of unstaged portrait of the city. Were you shooting that guerilla style? How much of that was staged versus documentary-style shots?

Well, obviously it’s not — I didn’t stage the cars and the tramways and the passersby. So yes, I wanted this idea to see if we can make like this counter-symphony or an anti-symphony of a city. That was like a genre, the city symphonies in the twenties and thirties, like Dziga Vertov or Berlin Symphony of a City. It’s a lot of films at the beginning of cinema, praising modern life and the energy of cities. I wanted to this as something a bit against that, but also to include the plot a little bit in it. In order to do that, yes, we shot guerrilla-style. We didn’t even have permits for a while from the mayor’s office, we shot many days without any authorization.

So but here we have this phantasma, like that in Hollywood, things are always done perfectly nice, and here, why do we do like amateurs? But I like being an amateur, actually. So we shot that exactly like an amateur crew. Not many takes, no rehearsals at all. And of course, all the background action is real.

There’s one point where an older woman says something rude to the camera, which I assume was just a passerby, and you left that in there as a way to sort of hint that this was all being shot in real-time.

Yeah, that was serendipity. I didn’t even hear her very well what she said, only later when seeing the takes, the rushes, did I realize. But you know, this kind of thing, it’s always a kind of trusting that, because cinema is very important, well, you can call it art or industry or entertainment, whatever, but also it’s a recording device. It’s something that records the reality and transforms that into images. This dimension of cinema is something that, for me, is very important. And in order to do things like that, you really have to trust not only yourself and the crew and so on, but the reality. I mean, you would go on a certain day and nothing would happen in the street, and on the next when you don’t have the camera on, much more interesting things happen. We had a very spectacular accident in a street in one of the scenes, fortunately nobody died, like three seconds after he stopped the camera. But that’s it, you get some from the reality and you lose some, you cannot have it all.

The guy in the big Hummer that parks in the sidewalk, was that an accident or was that something that you staged?

That’s a fine question because it’s a mix. I wanted that Hummer there, it’s a big SUV, right? It’s a Hummer. But then we saw the real driver was this small guy, and without telling him, we shot him when he got there to the shooting and we, and in the end, left that take inside. So it’s half-staged, half-documentary.

The film sort of addresses all of these ideas about fascism and nationalism and racism. Why did you think this story about the sex tape was a good frame for those?

Sometimes, it’s like something which, if something is more spectacular in one way or another, you get a more powerful response than to something which may be more dangerous but less spectacular. I think it’s exactly the same now with the COVID. Because if you would see the virus on people’s skin, maybe some people would be less inclined to say the virus doesn’t exist.

If I can use this metaphor, we try to see the virus of obscenity taking shape in other things, but it’s not very obvious for many of us. That’s the main reason to contrast the story with this. Because for instance, the stories related to the relationship between the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust, the participation, I would say, is not only to create this contrast, but also to show in a way that these values of the church who would condemn a woman like Emi, but their values in the not-so-old history are much dirtier and more toxic than a poor sex video. Something like that.

So Eugen, we only see him in the first scene, right? He doesn’t come back. What was that choice about?

I think there was a version of the script at the beginning where I didn’t know exactly what to do, where he was much more present. And then gradually, I took him out for two reasons. One is a little bit of playing with this idea that the man in the couple is only the dick. It’s reduced only to that. But also I like to define the main character, to define Emi, only in relation to this story. That’s why you don’t see her kids. You don’t see her family. I had a scene actually, where she was visiting her mother and child, and she was going there with a toy. But I took it out, because it became too much like a traditional narrative where the character is always defined by the characters around her. In this case, I wanted to keep her only like a generic character in a more, not to define her so much with the husband, the kids, the house.

It’s not very nice to say that regarding the actors, but I think I told even to them, I said, “You know, the cars in the street or a billboard or a prop, whatever it is, are as important as the characters.” Because it’s not only the story of this person. What is around the background is also part of the film.

Well, it’s like when she has a sex tape that’s online, now she becomes like just more imagery.

Yes, also that.

‘Bad Luck Banging’ is available now in select theaters. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can check out his film review archive here.

In a surprising move given Republicans‘ generally stubborn refusal to walk back their offensive remarks, Rep. Lauren Boebert is actually apologizing for her recent remarks about Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar. Earlier in the week, Boebert attended a campaign event where she claimed that a Capitol Police officer frantically ran up to Omar out of an implied concern that she might be a suicide bomber. Boebert then referred to Omar as part of the “jihad squad.”

After catching wind of the remarks, Omar shot down Boebert’s false story on Twitter. “Fact, this buffoon looks down when she sees me at the Capitol, this whole story is made up. Sad she thinks bigotry gets her clout.” Normally, this would be the part where Boebert, or her fellow rabble-rousers like Marjorie Taylor Greene, would double down. Instead, Boebert issued an extremely rare apology.

“I apologize to anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment about Rep. Omar,” Boebert tweeted. “I have reached out to her office to speak with her directly. There are plenty of policy differences to focus on without this unnecessary distraction.”

As of this writing, Omar hasn’t acknowledged Boebert’s apology. In fact, shorty after, the Minnesota congresswoman once again implored Congress to deal with Omar’s dangerous rhetoric.

“Saying I am a suicide bomber is no laughing matter,” Omar tweeted in reference to Boebert’s campaign event remarks. “@GOPLeader and @SpeakerPelosi need to take appropriate action, normalizing this bigotry not only endangers my life but the lives of all Muslims. Anti-Muslim bigotry has no place in Congress.”

(Via Lauren Boebert on Twitter, Ilhan Omar on Twitter)

Three Hours is our way of telling you if a game is going to hook you within the first few hours of playing. We will play a game for a minimum of three hours — sometimes more if a game needs it — and tell you if we recommend playing it or not. Today, we’re looking at Battlefield 2042, the latest game in EA’s largest military shooter franchise.

What is Battlefield 2042?

Battlefield 2042 is the latest game in EA’s hit military shooter franchise. Before games like Fornite and Apex Legends took over the shooter landscape, it was always a fierce fight for supremacy between Call of Duty and Battlefield. The key difference between the two is that Battlefield isn’t a yearly release, so there’s more pressure on each release to have a longer-lasting impact and show a major quality difference between the previous iteration of the game and the new one.

Battlefield 2042 is the first new Battlefield release in three years. Not only that, this is the first game in the franchise on new generation hardware such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. The expectation for 2042 is that it will show it is still a multiplayer shooter worth putting our valuable hours into, especially since there’s no campaign. That lack of campaign means that they’re going all-in on the multiplayer being good enough for us to spend a significant amount of our time playing.

That multiplayer has three modes:

• All Out Warfare: This is where players will find Battlefield classics such as Conquest and Breakthrough.
• Hazard Zone: A smaller scale mode where squads fight it out for data drives and extraction points.
• Portal: A mode where players can play on classic Battlefield maps with a nice next gen look to them.

Considering the variety of modes, Battlefield does a good job justifying the pricetag of a game that is multiplayer-only. But does it have the depth inside those modes to make a minimum of $60 worth your while?

Why You Should Play Battlefield 2042

1. Vehicles are fun
2. Explosions look great
3. When it clicks there is nothing better

There are moments in Battlefield 2042 where everything comes together and it meets every expectation that has been set for it. These moments usually occur in the middle of intense battles through Conquest or Breakthrough where pure chaos is unfolding everywhere: explosions all around the player, gunfire flying by your head, etc. It feels like even one slip up will lead to a zone falling to the opposing team. It’s what Battlefield has always been known for and those high-intensity moments are where the game continues to shine even now.

Why You Should Not Play Battlefield 2042

1. Bugs
2. Empty maps
3. Lack of depth

Unfortunately, those highlight moments are few and far between. If you’ve ever played a Battlefield game at launch, you won’t be surprised to learn it has numerous bugs that require fixes. These bugs are such a problem right now that a major update is on the way. While patches can fix performance, this year’s Battlefield still has unfixable problems, like huge maps meant to hold the new 128 player limit. It an ambitious idea, but there are a lot of empty spaces that result in running around only to get killed by someone you couldn’t even see. You will then mash, then hold, the respawn button so you can load in faster and do it all over again.

Our Take

Unless you have a squad of friends that have been playing Battlefield together for years, either pass over this one or wait for a significant price drop. There is a serious lack of depth in Battlefield 2042 that is honestly surprising. There’s very little motivation for playing matches beyond watching experience numbers go up. Customization options feel basic and forgettable, the class system is dull, and the character avatars are uninteresting. Squad balance feels pointless, even in modes like Hazard that are meant to emphasize the importance of a balanced team. Hazard, in particular, just isn’t very fun without a strong group of friends to play it with.

If this is going to be a multiplayer-only game, then the multiplayer needs to capture us. It never did. Maybe we’ll give it a try again after the patches go through and it’s been updated significantly, but with so many other shooters out there, we’re not sure when that will be.

We’ve been on a major quest this year to rank all of the best fast food your money can buy. If you’re looking for the best chicken sandwich, we’ve got you. The most decadent burger? We’ve had it. We have big opinions on the best milkshakes to chill with and even hit salads for the health nuts out there. But in my mad rush to cover fast food, I neglected my first love — fried chicken. When I was a picky child, I exclusively wanted to eat these three things: pancakes, cereal, and, above all else, bone-in fried chicken. Considering pancakes and fried chicken are incredibly close to waffles and fried chicken, I’d say young Dane was on to something!

So when the time finally came to try all the fast food fried chicken chains, I was hyped. There was no eye-rolling this time around. And luckily for all of us, it’s pretty hard to f*ck up fried chicken — so even though I think there is a hierarchy of chicken chains and preparations, these chains are all winners in my book. That’s a rarity in fast food, though it could be because Sonic, Dairy Queen, or Burger King don’t do fried chicken.

For this ranking, we’ve specifically focused on non-processed fried chicken which, in all but one occasion, had us focusing on bone-in birds. Because I’m based on the West Coast, I wasn’t able to include a few regional chicken chains like Zaxby’s (which everyone loves) and Bojangles (which everyone hates). At each chain, I enjoyed multiple trips in order to sample both white and dark meat, and alternate varieties like spicy, mild, or extra crispy. For different variations, I think an individual ranking is fair, but in terms of white vs dark meat, we’re just going to say go ahead and pick your poison (I’m a breast and thigh guy, personally).

Let’s eat some bird!

10. KFC — Extra Crispy Style

Extra Crispy style has to be the biggest waste of menu space in the entire fast food universe. I get that KFC’s Original Recipe chicken leaves a lot of crunch to be desired (I’ll get to this soon) but that doesn’t mean we need a bland Extra Crispy version to make up for it. Original Recipe is delicious, Extra Crispy just tastes like crunchy salt. Those interesting 11 herbs and spices that KFC prides itself with aren’t here. I don’t know why the spices had to go in order to make a crunchier batter but I hate it.

Think about what this chicken is taking the place of! We could have a KFC spicy style or 11 different herbs and spices! Instead, we have this flavorless bird. The bland batter puts the quality of KFC’s chicken in the spotlight, and it’s not great.

Bottom Line

The meat is juicy but unless you like the taste of pure chicken, the batter just isn’t packing enough flavor here.

Find your nearest KFC here.

9. Church’s — Original Chicken

I really want to like Church’s Chicken because it seems like the underdog brand in the chicken space but for the most part, this chicken just misses the mark in too many key areas. The texture of the breading is absolutely on point, it’s crispy and craggy, and crunches like auditory ecstasy, but doesn’t taste very flavorful outside of the crunch, and the chicken inside is often very dry and tough.

In my experience, sometimes a layer of wet batter will lurk between the crispy skin and the chicken. Biting into a piece of fried chicken and tasting moisture before you actually reach the meat is alarming. I’ve never felt as paranoid as when I’m eating this chicken. I’m constantly questioning things between bites, Is it cooked, did I get a bad piece? It’s too much to handle.

The Bottom Line

Church’s has good biscuits and a pretty decent chicken sandwich. Order those instead of the bone-in chicken and you won’t be disappointed.

Find your nearest Church’s here.

8. Church’s — Spicy Chicken

The spicy version of Church’s chicken has almost all of the same qualities as the Original recipe version, but with an added cayenne pepper kick. The use of cayenne gives this bird an overall drier texture and flavor, so skip the white meat if you’re grabbing the Spicy bird over the Original.

If I’m being generous, I’d say that Church’s best feature is the texture of the batter, adding cayenne pepper to it adds the flavor that the Original Recipe bird is sorely missing, ultimately leading to a better experience.

The Bottom Line

Similar to Church’s Original Recipe but slightly better because the cayenne pepper adds some flavor to this otherwise bland chicken.

Find your nearest Church’s here.

7. Wingstop — Lemon Pepper

When it came time to rank Wingstop I hit a bit of a roadblock. Do we actually go about ranking all eleven flavors? That seemed crazy, but choosing a flavor as simple as Original Buffalo seemed unfair. Of course a piece of fried chicken doused with sauce is going to taste superior to a dry piece of fried chicken! So, in an effort to keep things fair, I decided to rank both of the chain’s dry-rubbed flavors. I figure that’s not a far cry from something like KFC’s 11 herbs and spices, so it feels fair.

First up is Lemon Pepper. The flavor here is your typical citrus-infused salt and pepper blend, but depending on who tossed your wings (or thighs, Wingstop also does fried chicken thighs and they’re delicious) things can get overwhelmingly zesty. The meat of both the thighs and wings is incredibly juicy, falling off the bone in tender bite-sized pieces, and this is one of the few flavors at Wingstop that won’t have you burping fire hours after your meal.

Since Lemon Pepper is a dry rub, your order won’t get overly soggy, offering up a nice crispy skin that is freshly seasoned and full of flavor.

The Bottom Line

If you’re not looking to make a mess on your hands, Wingstop’s dry rub Lemon Pepper is a great flavor that dances on the palate and keeps your focus on the juicy chicken on the inside, instead of masking it with heavy sauces like your typical wing.

Find your nearest Wingstop here.

6. Jollibee — Chicken Joy

Yeah yeah yeah, the West Coast doesn’t have Zaxby’s or Bojangles, but we have Filipino chicken chain Jollibee, and I’ll take that over Bojangles any day of the week! Jollibee’s Chicken Joy features a light and flakey cornstarch-based batter that is always perfectly crispy and houses juicy bites of dark meat chicken. The batter tastes like it’s flavored with salt, white pepper, garlic powder, five-spice, and the always sumptuous MSG. I know it’s MSG because only MSG makes my mouth water the way fresh Chicken Joy does.

I wish the chain offered breasts and wings but what it lacks in variety, it makes up for in flavor. Plus this is the only chain where you can order a piece of fried chicken with a side of spaghetti and a peach mango pie, and even though this is a ranking about chicken, that’s going to earn it some points in our book.

The Bottom Line

If you’re all about crispy but light batter and juicy dark meat, Jollibee is the move.

Find your nearest Jollibee here.

5. KFC — Original Recipe

This might be nostalgia speaking — I think my very first taste of fried chicken was a KFC Original Recipe chicken breast — but I love KFC’s famed blend of 11 herbs and spices. Yes, the chicken isn’t nearly as crispy as it should be, the breading has a softness to it that absorbs grease so powerfully that after eating a piece your hands will straight up be wet, but the flavor is so damn mouthwateringly good.

Garlic colliding with onion, pepper, celery salt, paprika, ginger, oregano, basil, celery salt — I think I even taste some dried mustard in there — it’s an assault of flavor and I love it, lack of crispiness be damned!

The Bottom Line:

KFC’s Original Recipe is an absolute classic. If you love crispy chicken, look elsewhere, but if you’re big on flavor just a handful of chicken spots beat this beauty.

Find your nearest KFC here.

4. Wingstop — Louisiana Rub

As much as I love KFC’s Original Recipe, Wingstop’s Louisiana Rub packs way more flavor. So much so that you won’t even miss skipping out on the heavily saucey flavors Wingstop offers. Featuring a blend of Cajun-inspired spices, Louisiana Rub combines cayenne pepper with garlic and onion powder, paprika, thyme, and basil. It’s slightly spicy and sports an earthy flavor of herbs that makes us question why KFC needs 11 to do what they do when Wingstop is working with just a handful and producing something that tastes this good.

It’s full of depth with the right balance of saltiness, heat, and sweetness.

The Bottom Line

So good that you won’t miss the heavy buffalo sauce with a subtle spicy kick that keeps the mouth-watering. Take it to the next level by ordering thighs instead of wings.

Find your nearest Wingstop here.

3. Popeyes — Spicy Chicken

It shouldn’t surprise you to see Popeyes placed so highly in this roundup but you might be shocked to see the Spicy variety absent from the top two. I’m just going to go ahead and say it, Popeyes Spicy chicken is the lesser of the two flavors offered by the chain.

Featuring Popeyes’ delicious crispy batter, which is breaded so haphazardly that you almost always get these delicious long tendrils of fried batter streaming from your chicken, Popeyes Spicy chicken adds a cayenne pepper kick to their usual seasoning and it makes the chicken taste drier than its mild counterpart. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still very delicious, but if you taste the two flavors side by side you’ll pick up on a distinct dryness from the spicier blend.

It’s not enough to cause this chicken to rank any lower but it’s keeping it from true greatness. Please don’t think I’m afraid of spice or can’t handle it, I love food so hot that eating it feels like a challenge, but I have to speak truth here — Popeyes Mild for the win!

The Bottom Line

It’s delicious but if you want the best tasting chicken from Popeyes you’ll order our next entry.

Find your nearest Popeyes here.

2. Popeyes — Mild Chicken

Popeyes Mild chicken is the stuff of dreams. Under layers of crispy batter awaits juicy and tender bites of meat that never taste dry or overcooked, even after they’ve been sitting under a heat lamp or in the box for a few minutes. The breading is seasoned with a blend of garlic and onion flavors and the right balance of salt and pepper that results in a mildly sweet aftertaste that pairs perfectly with a hint of honey or hot sauce.

If Popeyes made chicken and waffles, they would end the fast food game forever. We would tear down all of the competition just to make space to build more Popeyes. Order the Mild chicken instead of the crowd favorite Spicy variety — this is literally why people keep hot sauce in the car.

The Bottom Line

Find your nearest Popeyes here.

1. Raising Cane’s — Chicken Tenders

This is a controversial pick for the number one spot, we get that. Allow us to explain. Every fast food name on this list has had one thing in common: they sell bone-in fried chicken. Raising Canes does not, they exclusively sell chicken tenders, so if we’re going to include chicken tenders you can argue that we should include chains like Burger King, Carl’s Jr, Chick-fil-A, and any other fast food chain that has fried chicken tenders on their menu. To include Raising Cane’s in this list, let alone give the chain the number one spot, seems like an insult to the entire concept of the article!

But hear us out! Raising Cane’s is different!

What makes this chicken chain different from Burger King, Carl’s Jr, and the like, is that its chicken tenders are actual chicken tenders, not processed meat that is formed into the shape of a chicken strip. These are real tenders, and actual cuts of chicken. Cane’s chicken is never frozen, marinated, and fried to order. It’s also the only thing the chain sells aside from a few sides, so you can’t say that Raising Cane’s doesn’t sell fried chicken — they are keeping the same practices as the other chicken chains on this list, and are arguably going a step further by not freezing their meat.

They just have a specialty, like Jollibee or Wingstop. Only in this case it’s the tender. Which I’d say is the better move.

By focusing on a single specialty, Raising Cane’s has perfected fast food fried chicken. The meat is without fail juicy and tender (obviously), with a craggy hand-breading that seems designed to perfectly absorb the chain’s in-house Cane’s sauce. This is the sort of chicken chain A-listers like Snoop Dogg or Justin Bieber cater their parties with, it’s easily the best tasting fast food chicken you’ll ever have the pleasure of eating. Sure, every time you approach the drive-thru line you’ll second guess even bothering to wait in the long snake-like lines that are always weaving through mini-mall parking lots. Do it, it’s worth it and absolutely lives up to the hype.

The Bottom Line:

There aren’t any bones here, but if you’re on the hunt for the best tasting fried chicken in the fast food universe, form factor be damned, it’s Raising Cane’s. No doubt.

Find your nearest Raising Cane’s here.

Scarcely has the gulf between potential drama and actual drama been so wide as in House Of Gucci, a movie that seems to promise the messiest, most camp soap opera of the year and ends up delivering something like a gloriously costumed, overlong recap of a movie that happened somewhere offscreen. After almost two hours and 40 minutes of movie it left me feeling little beyond an intense craving for a tiny espresso.

How could this have happened? We all saw the trailer. Gawked at the magazine-style photoshoots. Made the memes. The ridiculous outfits! The ridiculous accents! Jared Leto disastrously overacting! House of Gucci looked to all like a full-length, maximum budget adaptation of the Italian hands emoji. Yes, in fact, we wouldst like to live deliciously. What happened?

At first, at least, the ingredients for delicious living all seem to be in place. Lady Gaga might not be the rangiest actress around but she is transfixing, practically pulsating with short Italian girl energy like a future Real Housewife Of Milan as Patrizia Reggiani, the striving secretary of her father’s trucking company. Papa! You work-a too hard! Come-a take emuppa resta letta Patrizia make-a you a-nice a-cuppa di espresso!

Then when she meets Mauritzio Gucci at a house party one night, you can practically hear a tiny popping sound as her ovaries explode at the mere mention of his famous last name. A little striver, this one. Meanwhile, Adam Driver, as Mauritzio, is brilliant once again, awkwardly upright, confidently dorky, a glorious human sight gag clipping the legs of his trousers before biking off down cobblestoned boulevards as beatifically as if starring in his own Barilla commercial. Ah, to be rich.

What Patrizia lacks in reach she makes up for in persistence and soon the two are married, to the objections of Mauritzio’s louche former actor father, played by Jeremy Irons in full ascot mode. Patrizia, naturally, lights a fire under Mauritzio’s calzone oven, trying to get him to man up and claim his birthright in the Gucci brand. Which at that point is mostly controlled by Mauritzio’s uncle, Aldo Gucci, played by Al Pacino. Aldo is just about as keen as Patrizia to get Mauritzio involved, seeing as how Aldo’s son and only heir, Paolo Gucci, played by Jared Leto, is clearly a moron with terrible taste.

As for Jared Leto’s acting: Do you know how hard it is to overact while playing an Italian? Leto is playing the comically stupid nephew in an operatic movie set in a country where everyone already looks like they’re starring in their own soap opera, opposite one of the greatest overactors of our time, Al Pacino. And still, STILL he manages to overact so hard that you can imagine Nic Cage telling him to tone it down. I don’t even know what accent he’s doing here, but he sounds like if Borat was a schizophrenic child molester.

But Jared Leto overacting was what I expected, and honestly the thought of him torturing all his acquaintances with that moronic accent while staying in character for months on end makes me happy. The bigger issue is that the movie’s conflicts never quite materialize. In one scene, Patrizia walks through Chinatown in New York, becoming increasingly furious as she sees all the knockoff Gucci bags being sold openly. She gathers up a bunch of them to bring to the office to confront Aldo about it. Aldo seems unconcerned. “If some housewife in Long Island wants to believe she is a Gucci customer, why should I stop her?”

“But they are cheapening the Gucci name!” Patrizia blusters.

Both of them seem like they have valid points, but the bigger issue is: the conflict never resolves and the pieces don’t even really fit together. Is Gucci making money off people selling cheap knockoffs? If so, how? If they wanted to stop people selling knockoffs, how would even they do that? Basically, the entire movie is like this. Characters disagree on points that don’t entirely make sense, fighting over control of a company without ever conveying any idea of how their visions for that company might diverge. Or how those visions might play in the market. Maurizio and Patrizia don’t really grow apart, it just sort of happens at some point and we’re left to infer. At one point, Maurizio says, “I want Gucci to be the Vatican of fashion.”

So… opulent? In decline? Shuffling around designers to cover up their pedophilia? What is even going on here? House of Gucci feels like a series of facts in search of a story. It’s a long montage of gorgeously shot, sumptuously costumed scenes lacking any real sense of cause and effect. What is any of it supposed to mean, beyond all the rich people bitchily drinking espressos? In a movie that runs almost 160 minutes we should probably get some sense of it. In fairness, it did make me really crave a cigarette and a tiny coffee in an apres-ski situation somewhere in the Alps.

But for the most part, it feels like the second straight movie in which Ridley Scott probably figured his first-rate direction could overcome a second-rate script. Lots of times it probably can, but that’s the nature of gambling: sometimes you lose.

‘House Of Gucci’ is available in theaters now. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Halsey teamed up with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to make If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, one of the year’s best pop albums (or at least, album by an often-pop-leaning artist). They have spoken on multiple occasions about how thrilled they are to have worked with the duo, and in a new interview, they revealed that first reaching out to them felt like writing a letter to Santa.

In a new NME feature, Halsey said, “First of all, I thought I was writing a letter to Santa being like, ‘I’ve been a very good girl.’ I was just really honest and said I was a huge fan and I’ve been plagiarizing you guys for years — badly — and I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I have anything new to offer you, but this album is about pregnancy, gender identity, body horror. The most important thing to me is that this album has tension — it needs to be visceral, or I’m doing a disservice to the message.”

They then compared the experience of asking Reznor and Ross to collaborate like trying to get into famously exclusive Berlin nightclub Berghain: “I’ve been to Berlin like 15 times and still won’t go to Berghain because I’m scared they’re gonna turn me away at the door. If they say no to me, I’m literally never gonna recover, so I just don’t even wanna go. That’s kind of what this felt like — waiting outside Berghain being like, ‘Are they gonna think I’m cool enough?’”

Meanwhile, Reznor recently noted that he was also intimated by the idea of the collaboration, saying, “To come along and work with Halsey, I think initially, we were intimidated. ‘Is it a pop star, and does that mean there are big businesses affiliated with it and it has to feel a certain way?’ We don’t want to f*ck that up, and we’re not out to troll. We were envisioning, to go to [the] worst-case scenario, ‘At some point, someone’s going to talk sense into Halsey that this could be career-sabotaging because it’s not going to be a TikTok track.’”

Despite securing Kyle Rittenhouse a not guilty verdict in the highly controversial trial over the killing of two people during a Black Lives Matter protest in Wisconsin, attorney Mark Richards has been a vocal opponent of the right-wing machine that’s sprung up around Rittenhouse in an attempt to turn him into a Republican folk hero. Unfortunately, those warnings have gone unheeded by his client as Rittenhouse immediately appeared on Tucker Carlson following the verdict and has already posed for a photo with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Not only has the former president latched onto the Rittenhouse bandwagon, but so has his son, Don Jr., who Richards recently blasted for attempting to gift Rittenhouse with a new AR-15. Via Insider:

“Gun Owners of America is sending Kyle Rittenhouse an AR-15. Sign the card in support of Kyle. Americans have a fundamental right to defend themselves and to keep and bear arms. The verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial is a recognition of those rights,” Trump Jr. said in a since-deleted tweet.

Richards told Insider: “He’s an idiot. I don’t have to expand on that because it speaks for itself.”

Unfortunately, capitalizing on shooting deaths has become something of a trend for Don Jr. The former president’s son immediately pounced on Alec Baldwin and the accidental shooting death on the set of Rust. Not even four days after the incident, Don Jr. began selling T-shirts that read, “Guns Don’t Kill People, Alec Baldwin Kills People.” Classy just like his dad, isn’t he?

(Via Insider)

R&B singer Tinashe and New York radio personality Ebro Darden are trending on Twitter after a video of their 2013 interview on his Hot 97 morning show resurfaced in which he teases her about her name. After Ebro asked Tinashe’s last name (it’s Kachingwe, by the way) and his co-host, Peter Rosenberg, supplied the answer, Ebro tried to joke about Tinashe’s “unusual” name — which comes from the Zimbabwean Shona language and means “We have God (or God is with us)” — somehow mashing together reckless colorism with an ignorant, classist statement.

“Can we point out how light-skinned she is with a ghetto-ass name?” Ebro wonders. Rosenberg checks him, telling him, “It’s not a ghetto name, it’s an African name.” Although he incorrectly states that it’s a Nigerian name, Tinashe clarifies that it’s Zimbabwean and gives them the definition. Ebro tries to explain himself, saying, “Sometimes these ghetto names are actually African.” Meanwhile, Tinashe merely smiles at Ebro in the clip on Twitter, which cuts off before her response. In the full interview, which is still on YouTube, she addresses the light skin comment, explaining that her father is from Zimbabwe, while her mom is white.

In posting the video, the user who resurfaced the clip pointed out the singer’s composure in the awkward moment but let’s be honest: She’s probably used to it. People say all kinds of wild things to kids who don’t just have generic or Biblical names and the question “what are you mixed with” gets lobbed at fairer-skinned Black people all the time. In fact, Tinashe herself imperfectly explained colorism during the run-up to her third studio album, Joyride, pointing out how her complexion often causes confusion from other people. Twitter, being Twitter, dragged her for the comment, but it looks like today, the tables have turned.

Users excoriated Ebro for his comments (it’s unclear whether they recognized how old the video is), while pointing out the obvious irony in them, given Ebro himself is a light-skinned Black man with African roots and an unusual name. For his part, he apologized for comments, saying, “Yea this was a terrible joke, we were using the name skit for people to learn her origins… love Tinashe that’s my homey still.” Obviously, he’s (mostly) grown from this era of confrontational journalism, although he also made Saweetie cry by dissing her freestyle a few years later. Hopefully, he’ll continue to learn and grow, as we all should, and find a way to balance his jokes with consideration, thoughtfulness, and empathy. You can watch the full interview above.