A Fine Prospect: Fill & Download for Free

I think this merits Will Smith.Elected Supreme Court Justices would be an unmitigated disaster.It would start out fine.Prospective justices would run on platforms like, “I promise to adhere strictly to the text and history of the Constitution,” or, “I promise to interpret the law in a way that maximizes justice for the individual parties in each case.”But within perhaps two election cycles, some unscrupulous attorney (or maybe even a non-attorney) would get the idea of running on a platform like, “I promise to vote to overturn [Roe v. Wade/Citizens United/Obergefell v. Hodges/D.C. v. Heller],” or, “I promise to judge each case in accordance with the [Bible/Quran/Torah/Bhagavad Gita].”The legislature is meant to be the branch that is responsive to the desires of the people as to what they think the law ought to be.The judiciary is, in an ideal world, brazenly antidemocratic. The judiciary should have an attitude of, “We don’t give a shred of a sliver of a damn what the people want. The law says X, so X is the law.” And if the people don’t like X being the law, they should go to the legislature to have X repealed or amended.Original Question:“Should the constitution of the US be changed to have supreme court justices run for that office, serving only 1 - 10 year term, instead of being nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate?”

Right before the lockdown in February 2020, I sneaked out on a business trip to Berlin, Germany. Here is me in Käfer, a fine-dining restaurant on the rooftop of German Bundestag. It is the only parliamentary building in the entire world that actually has a restaurant open to the public.I remember we discussed the Charite hospital - a tall building on the right - and their clinical trials of new oncological drugs.In seven months, this hospital would become world-famous after saving Alexei Navalny’s life, a Russian opposition leader who fell into coma after being poisoned with a nerve gas Novichok in Siberia.Charite Hospital has many Russian doctors who moved to Germany to improve their career prospects and living conditions.I heard Russian speech everywhere in Berlin.

What do you get when you cross David Fincher’s dark yet stylised sensibilities with the world’s greatest detective?For starters, you get an intriguing and hugely exciting trailer, and you get the promise of a harrowing murder mystery that happens to feature Batman.I’ll get straight to it – I thought this was a fantastic trailer, particularly when you consider Matt Reeves has only finished about one-third of the film’s production.The most noticeable feature in that two-minute trailer was the tone and atmosphere, specifically it being uncannily reminiscent of two Fincher classics – Se7en and Zodiac.Reeves promised us a neo-noir detective story, and he’s begun paying off on that promise.Paul Dano’s grimy and twisted take on the Riddler has echoes of John Doe and the Zodiac Killer; the dark, rain-soaked streets of Gotham are reminiscent of Se7en’s unnamed crime-infested city.Much like Christopher Nolan took inspiration from Heat to frame The Dark Knight’s tone and sensibility, Reeves has seemingly taken a few pages out of Fincher’s playbook for his neo-noir mystery.I saw a lot of Fincher here, and that has my curiosity piqued.And then there’s the Bat, who seems slightly edgier, slightly more fractured and less sure of himself than other recent interpretations.This is essentially ‘Batman: Year Two’ after all, and Bruce has plenty of growth and evolution ahead of him.I was excited about the prospect of Robert Pattinson essaying the part; but a fair few people weren’t, primarily because of the Twilight stigma, which, if you’ve been following his career, he’s shed a while ago.And here, he looks the part. The trailer should assuage concerns that many of his detractors voiced, and if not, well you can’t win them all.But the fact remains that Pattinson is a fine actor and there is no reason why he won’t deliver a fine performance here.The trailer also echoed a few choices that the Arkham Trilogy of games made – most noticeably, the brutal beat down of a hapless goon.The warehouse sequence from Batman V Superman showcased that brutality, and from the look of things, Reeves intends to double down on it.I walked away from the trailer with my excitement levels raised, and for one aspect in particular – Paul Dano’s performance as The Riddler.I think Dano has been an incredible actor for over a decade, and this role seems tailor-made for Dano to showcase his unnerving grasp of playing demented, creepy characters.It’s a stacked cast – Pattinson, Dano, Colin Farrell, Jeffrey Wright, Andy Serkis, John Turturro, and Peter Skarsgaard, among others. Expect solid-to-great performances all around.So then, what do you get when you cross David Fincher’s dark yet stylised sensibilities with the world’s greatest detective?Well, Murray, you get what you f*ckin deserve, and Matt Reeves’ The Batman is shaping up to be a movie we both need and deserve.