The Substatic Monthly: October
Spooky season was surprisingly host to cute and cosy games, unexpectedly racist science fiction and a heaping helping of HEALTH
I’m not going to lie, it’s been a bit of a rough month, but i’ve still managed to snake through some interesting offerings from the world of games, cinema, music and literature. Here’s what I’ve been up to:
GAMES
Toki Tori
A very cute but fiendishly complex puzzle game about rescuing eggs. I don't have much to say about this one other than I really enjoyed it. It does a good job giving you that satisfying eureka moment when you finally figure out the right sequence of events to clear a stage. It's a game about the alchemical interaction of abilities and environment that will be elevated and built upon in it's sequel, which I'm currently playing and is also a total bastard of a game but I kind of love it.
Cloud Gardens
Some of my thoughts on this game are already out in the wild in my Terra Nil video but to reiterate: a beautiful, mostly calming game about bring nature back to post-human environments that's occasionally frustrating but if nothing else an excuse to coo over lovely plant growth animations and great prop work. Some truly inspiring little dioramas get made in the process of play, and honestly what more could you want?
Cocoon
Is this a good puzzle game? Probably not. It's breathtakingly linear, cutting away all the chaff (and some might argue the joy) of testing ideas out but the result is a game that is buttery smooth, designed for morons like me who struggle with lateral thinking and it looks and sounds amazing. Really love the mix of organic and technological here, the worlds-within-worlds thing is a great gimmick that leads to some mind-melting moments towards the end. Good game, not quite to Inside's standard, but then again, what is?
Saints Row 2022
A silly, funny, goofy little game that I had a great time playing. I think it suffers from feeling very much like a product of older generations. Tastes have changed over the years, the scope of what an open world can be, and by extension *has* to be results in this being too little too late, but it's undeniable the amount of love and care that went into making the world of Santo Ileso. It doesn't quite pack the punch of the earlier games but it did give me a powerful wave of nostalgia. Expect a video on these games soon.
FILMS
The Creator
A film that has gone down in my estimates the further away from it I get. A lovely looking original sci Fi world set in some amazing locales, but let down by an incredibly generic plot and an unbelievable amount of Orientalism in its world design and characters. Don’t get me wrong, 16 year old Tom would have found the image of a robot in buddhist robes unbelievably sick, but 36 year old Tom just finds it in bad taste given the very western nature of the film’s production. Gareth Evans should really just be working on other people’s films.
Avatar: The Way of Water
See above. Gorgeous visuals and moments towards the end that evoke memories of Cameron's older, better films but suffering the same problems of being boring and borderline racist. I don't know what it is with modern sci Fi that treats other cultures like this? Noble savages leading the fight against pantomime villains with white man’s burden leading the charge. Embarrassingly patronising at best, and downright malicious at worst. I can’t understand how Cameron has 3 more of these in the wings. Get writers who know those lives or fuck off.
The Age of Innocence
One of Scorsese's weaker efforts, but an undeniably luscious period offering, full of decadent locales and smouldering looks. Michelle Pfeiffer is brilliant in this, but my feelings about Daniel Day-Lewis are, as I'll go into in a bit, wholly contingent on what facial hair he’s sporting. A good watch, but I didn't love it.
Killers of the Flower Moon
For the sake of balance I will say that I don’t have the required lived experience to understand if the criticism parleyed against Killers of the Flower Moon is reasonable or not, but I know that as time has gone one my thoughts on this film have only gotten more complicated. Martin Scorsese made a 200 million dollar true crime podcast on celluloid full of nuance and magnatism and outright sickening portrayals of greed and evil and it ultimately ends up saying nothing groundbreaking or new.
It’s not so much a film about the erasure of Osage culture in the midst of these churning cycles of new capitalism, but rather one that just happens to feature those ideas on the way, and as a work featuring an indiginous peoples at it’s heart it feels staggeringly spartan in its representation there. It’s undeniably brilliant, but hard to parse in an era where Scorsese has reached this mythological do-no-wrong status in the eyes of insufferable film bores, brought on in part due to endless tedious conversations about the MCU and film lengths. I liked Hugo better.
There Will Be Blood
Quite a good companion piece to Killers of the Flower Moon, and an absolutely brilliant piece of character work from Daniel Day-Lewis, this time with luscious moustache in tow. A positively deranged film, through and through, I had a great time watching Day-Lewis slowly lose his mind in a battle of wits against scheming evangelical Paul Dano. And I finally get that ‘I drink your milkshake!’ meme from 15 years ago. Great film. Loved it a lot.
Talk To Me
I think this is one of those films that starts to fall apart the moment you think about it for too long, but it is an undeniably compelling character drama framed by this incredibly fucked up central premise. Ouiji board gone wrong is far from an original concept but the execution here is so well done that it feels fresh out the box. So engaged I was with this cast that I almost wish it was a played-straight coming of age drama. Sophie Wilde is unbelievably good in the lead, an actor destined for greatness, and I have high hopes for whatever the Phillipou Brothers come up with next.
MUSIC
The Pavillion of Dreams - Harold Budd
My new go-to album for calming the fuck down. A great bit of orchestral music that I had never really heard about before it being brought up in this video essay by Snow:
Nice tunes, can’t complain.
Tekkno - Electric Callboy
Listened to this on a whim as one of my colleagues was going to see them live this weekend, and ended up really, unironically digging them. A sort of German Atreyu mixed with Hadouken for a thumping medley of metal and electronica. Fun music.
Javelin - Sufjan Stevens
The musical equivalent of that one Lisa Simpson meme. Just a really sad album, full of beautiful songs about love and loss. I feel the same way about this as I did Nick Cave’s Ghosteen, like I was intruding onto someone else’s grief, and in a way we all are. I think I will remember this album for the rest of my life.
Odyssey - GRRL
Anothing thumping, angry electronic fable of banging tunes. I’ve nothing sophisticated to say about it, just that it gets my blood pumping.
Various albums by HEALTH
Genuinely do not know how to take this body of work. HEALTH have a touch of Nine Inch Nails about them, but I can’t quite grasp a throughline in these albums. The Max Payne Soundtrack might as well have been composed by someone else, how different it feels to the DISCO albums. That new single is a banger though, total about-to-fight-werewolves-in-a-nightclub 2005 straight to video tune.
BOOKS
Rendezvous With Rama
More thoughts on this in a video coming out *very* soon, but revisiting Arthur C Clarke’s wonderful rumination on shattering the veil of horror around big things from far away was just as good as the first time I read it. Going back did remind me, however, of how strangely of its time the novel is. Long sections dedicated to the fact that Commander Norton has two wives who know of eachother, and that two of his team are married to the same woman, half a chapter is dedicated to the idea that astronauts are so easily distracted by a pair of heaving breasts that bringing a woman on a mission is a safety risk. And then there are the Simps: Genetically engineered primates brought on missions to do grunt work. Mentioned once or twice then never brought up again, or even relevant to how the story plays out. Bizarre touches like these make the book for me, and I’m eternally curious how Denis Villeneuve is going to play these more odd elements in his planned adaptation.
A Day of Fallen Night
Still only about halfway through this titan of a novel, but very much awestruck by how nuanced, delicate and perspicacious it is. Undeniable that this is something that could only have been written by Samantha Shannon, although I obviously cannot judge by my own experiences. To me it holds to painful unspoken truths about the identity of womanhood that are riviting to read and have given me a much greater appreciation for why these different perspectives in literature are so important to champion, lest we get bogged down in terrible George RR Martin clones that think women being brutalized counts as good character development. Shannon’s work is stunning, and thoughtful, it knows to give just the right amount of world building, but to ensure it’s not just a fable of monarchs and dragons. Let’s see what joy and sorrow the second half brings.