VFX Show 289: Here

“Robert Zemeckis’ 2024 film “Here” could be one of the worst movies ever made. A sad sack melodrama of joyless people, perpetual victims, who possess no agency in their own lives trapped in a single room akin to a prison cell. One could make the case that the film is about the prison of the “American dream” fantasy and the distortions, self-deceptions, and lies required to believe it exists. The endless deaths and tragedies suggest that the house they live in is likely built on a Native American burial ground, a-la Poltergeist. Cuesta Verde anyone? I found myself hoping a nuclear bomb would go off outside their widow vaporizing their self-inflicted misery and mine. All the characters are cursed to live an unfulfilled life, vapid, and void of any kind of fulfillment only to die unable to remember anything but tragedy (unless they’re suffering from dementia).” —Matt Wallin

‘Forrest Gump,’ 25 Years Later: A Bad Movie That Gets Worse With Age

Mike Seymour, Jason Diamond, and Matt Wallin discuss the film and its visual effects in this episode of the VFX Show. Listen for free on FX Guide.

VFX Show 274: Foundation

This week on the VFX Show, Mike Seymour and Matt Wallin use maths and psychohistory to wrap our heads around the visual effects in the Apple TV+, David Goyer series “Foundation” based on the books by Isaac Asimov.

The story chronicles the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, the mathematician Hari Seldon spends his life developing a theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematics of sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a Dark Age lasting 30,000 years before a second empire arises. Although the momentum of the Empire's fall is too great to stop, Seldon devises a plan by which "the onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little" to eventually limit this interregnum to just one thousand years.

Listen for free on FX Guide.

VFX Show 272: Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1

Your mission, listener, should you choose to accept it, is to listen to Mike Seymour, Jason Diamond, and Matt Wallin on this week’s VFX Show #272 on Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1. As always, should you or any of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This podcast will self-destruct in five secondsâ€ŠđŸ”„

VFX Show 271: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Mike Seymour, Jason Diamond, and Matt Wallin discuss the visual effects in the latest Lucasfilm adventure, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.” Listen for free on FX Guide.

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