An Announcement from Our Benefactors

People of Earth, it is time for me to speak to you yet again about the state of your ineptly-governed lump of rock. While it is clear that you have faced many hardships in the past year, that does not excuse certain actions and trends I have noticed. It is with great displeasure that I must actually voice my concerns; I honestly thought you'd grown out of this childish phase.

I am, of course, talking about annoying teenage pop stars.

And many, many other things.

Let's get one thing straight, mankind, your best creative years are behind you. There are those among my people who think Star Wars is a documentary and The Phantom Menace is a deliberate parody. Your planet is never going to produce another band like the Beatles. Da Vinci, Monet, Van Gough... gone. Today "art" either means "a convenient way to get nudity past the censors" or "a random splotch on a canvas."

Now then, on the subject of auto-tune: if you told me, back when I subjugated/liberated [delete according to personal taste/whatever the censor board feels like] your world that in twenty years people who cannot actually carry a tune would be able to sell records seriously with the help of a computer, I would have laughed in your face. And my laughter is deadly to your face, so that wouldn't end well.

Same goes for your movies: if you told me you'd use computers instead of actors, I'd say you were trying to sell me an extended video-game cutscene. Yes, Cameron, I'm looking at you. I see these ads for some new movie "from the director of Titanic and Avatar." I don't want to see it. I want to see another movie from the director of Terminator and Aliens. Hell, Aliens was so good I let it get past the censor board... Verhoeven had to maneuver around them by claiming his bug hunt movie was a parody. But I digress.

It's a curious dichotomy, mankind: as your movies get more and more "realistic," by which I apparently mean they contain finely-detailed smurfs in loincloths, your pop albums sound more and more like they were sung by robots. Are you trying to hold a normal mirror up to nature, or one of those goofy funhouse mirrors that makes your necks look as long as mine?

No, wait, I know, you're all a bunch of pigs, all concerned only with looking out for number one. And what's with this nonsense at the Oscars this year? You've got that movie about the stutterer versus that movie about that webernets thing, and that movie that honestly seems like The Matrix without the robot war part is the long shot. Don't get me wrong, I loved Inception. But part of the reason I loved it was because pretty much everything that could be done without CGI was done, well, without CGI.

In conclusion: Don't make me come down there.
-Overlord C'patu

ps - upcoming Who Reviews: "Vampires of Venice" on Feb 5 and "Love and Monsters" on Feb 6. "Flesh and Stone" sometime next week, plus updates of "The Hungry Earth" and "Cold Blood." Possibly "Fear Her" late next week. In case you can't tell, I'm working through seasons 2 and 5 simultaneously.