The Substatic Monthly: December

Sending out the year with my best month for films and my worst for games

Happy New Year!

Thanks for tagging along for 12 whole months of this flight of fancy. December’s been a wildly variable month for me, with burnout issues forcing me to actually do nothing for a while in order to recover, but i’m back now, and worse than ever! Here’s a run down of what I got up to in December.

GAMES

Nuclear Blaze

Probably the best out-of-nowhere experience I’ve had all year. I genuinely had never heard of this game before seeing it recommended by someone I follow on Twitter, and it’s magnificent.

A tight, brutal gauntlet of a game that has you facing off against blazing infernos and supernatural entities, all the while busting down doors, rescuing cats and making use of extremely funny high tech wireless hose technology. It’s great! A perfect game.

Star Ocean: First Departure R

I’ve already written about this game’s weird and wonderful skill system, but I have to give credit to the rest of the game, which is a funky world trekking adventure full of wonderfully pre-rendered towns and dungeons and a decent-if-limited combat system. It’s really let down only by the strange progress gating difficulty spikes and an obscene amount of backtracking, which after a while become a non issue given how obscenely powerful you can get by exploiting the game’s systems.

By the time I got to the end I was ready to leave, but I appreciate it as a historical artefact, especially in light of just starting the most recent entry in the series, The Divine Force (which is also great, really enjoying it)

FILMS

May December

An extremely challenging new offering from Todd Haynes, one cemented by three absolutely brilliant performances at its helm. It almost feels like a horror film at times, a family held in limbo by the volatility of an extremely disturbed matriarch, a fully grown man with the soul of a child wantonly manipulated from all sides, and an actress working through multiple layers of unreality.

It’s all held together by this wonderfully disarming soap opera tone that clashes perfectly with the grim reality of its subject matter. We finally got a ‘good’ Arronofsky film.

Fallen Leaves

As someone wholly uneducated on the work of Aki Kaurismaki, I went into this completely blind and ended up adoring it. A quiet, contemplative anti-capitalist text, it’s one of those classic films about nothing that’s secretly about everything. Lots of long, ponderous shots of chain smokers looking out of windows, led by two disarmingly good leads.

A brilliant soundtrack too. It won’t be for everyone, but it’s most definitely for me.

Logan Lucky

Nascar Oceans Eleven. I loved this. There’s something so immediately satisfying about the way that Soderburgh will just make a film about folk doing a job well, and that alone would be satisfying but it’s elevated by some great character work and surprisingly poignant moments.

A brilliant turn from Daniel Craig at the height of his Bond era that feels as much like a tester for Benoit Blanc as XXXX from Layer Cake did for Bond before it.

Riley Keough in this is the best anyone has ever looked on screen.

Godzilla Minus One

An undeniably well crafted film, one bursting with the indominable will to survive in the face of adversities. Great cast of characters, a really interesting take on this classic Kaiju, but I didn’t really love it.

As a big fan of Shin Godzilla I have a strong idea of what I want this kind of monster movie to be, and here the titular primordial lizard felt more like a Saturday Morning Cartoon than some inalienable, unknowable majestic beast. They just seemed like a bit of a dick, to be honest. It’s a taste thing, I know.

Infinity Pool

Gains 10 points for being a visually stunning and extremely macabre work. Loses 5 points immediately for Mia Goth’s grating CBBC accent (she’s great in this, almost channeling David Patrick Kelly in The Warriors, just after a certain point I wanted her character to fuck off). Kind of brilliant. Kind of limited in scope.

It’s an interesting subversion on the wicked foreigners trope, and I applaud Brandon Cronenberg for his very dedicated style and tone that is entirely seperate from the work of his father, but this was just too nihilistic for my liking in the end, the characters just too unlikable.

I don’t think anyone really knows what to do with Alexander Skarsgard, he seems to lie in the realm between world-class-villains and hopelessly endearing heroes. Let him do some comedies, man.

Crimes of the Future

Now on to his daddy’s latest work. I loved this, a beautifully twisted sci fi tale in the vein of eXistenZ that transforms body horror into this strangely beautiful, erotic rumination on the changing nature of the human body, and the devastating effect environmental decline has on it.

The ultimate ‘new kink unlocked’ flick, full of gorgeously weird performances and twisted prop work. The cursed Giger breakfast chair in particular will stay with me forever, I think.

The Boy and the Heron

I don’t think I can give this film a fair assessment as I probably need to see it again. It’s a strange entity, so clearly informed by Miyazaki’s entire body of work almost to the point of feeling derivative, and yet its pacing, tone and themes are bizarrely unique.

I don’t know if I liked it. I found its plot to be shallow and meandering, and it’s cast kind of boring, but I worry that I’ve been taking the film too literally, and that it should be recieved more as a spiritual mood piece. I don’t know, maybe Miyazaki has lost the juice.

I liked the parakeets.

Saltburn

Everyone online seems to think this is terrible, and it kind of is but I had such a good time watching it that I couldn’t possibly condemn it in such terms. A very funny film, disgusting and kind of beautiful in a shallow way. It’s like if The Talented Mr Ripley was directed by the Farrelly Brothers.

Some great performances throughout, (especially Rosamund Pike, who right now to me is the funniest woman in the world), and the whole thing looked really nice. More films should do the 4:3 aspect ratio I think.

MUSIC

The Seldom Seen Kid - Elbow

Was chatting to a colleague at our staff Christmas party and this band came up. I had never listened to them, which is mad considering I’m almost 40, but he recommended this album as an entry point and, well, yes, it’s a banger. Nothing particularly sophisticated to say other than I liked it and will be listening to more in the future.

No Burden - Lucy Dacus

I was a bit cold on BoyGenius’s The Record but there were a few tracks I really liked, and I’ve discovered that its because they’re the ones that most closely follow Dacus’s voice in the trio. This is a great album, I think she’s really talented, and I think i’m actually just a Phoebe Bridgers hater.

Rat Wars - Health

It’s good. Again I struggle to see the central thesis of this band, who seem to wallow in the shallow end of the Nine Inch Nails pool, and I find their online presence a bit annoying, but this is a solid album. No complaints.

A Torch in the Dark - Atreyu

I cut my teeth on Atreyu some twenty years ago and it’s been great revisiting the band since. This is a great album, and they’ve only gone from strength to strength. A good fair few earworms in the mix, and just some solid metalcore going on throughout. Don’t know how Alex Varkatzas still has it in him to scream like that.

Music for Bugs - Camiidae

A cute album full of cute songs. Feels like one for the Lena Raine/Jukio Kallio crowd (which is me). Need some more time with it, but i’ve enjoyed listening to it so far.

BOOKS

A Day of Fallen Night - Samantha Shannon

I finally finished this behemoth of a book! It’s great. An epic tale of the triumph of good over evil. Dragons. More dragons. Queer characters. More queer characters. A disarming amount of queer characters! What makes this book work so well is that it keeps it’s cast relatively small, and in doing so allows it to feel like three mini novels wrapped together into one big one in an extremely satisfying way.

It’s a book about love, and life, and grief in an extremely personal way that was an absolute delight to read, taking what was so good about Priory of the Orange Tree and arguably improving on it. A must read, in my eyes.

That’s it for 2023. Business will resume from next week, I’ve got some updates in the mix about my plans for 2024 both for the channel and this substack. Thanks for reading, hope you all have a wonderful new year!

Lots of love

Tom