With the rallying cry of its hashtagged title, Tom Gilroy’s #WaynesvilleStrong is a darkly comic and scarily plausible vision of a very near future in which low-wage work, enforced patriotism and the panoptic powers of the internet combine to create a pandemic hellscape that one laid-off meatpacking worker must delicately navigate, one videocall prompt at a time. The short was made quickly, in May and during quarantine, with everyone appropriately socially distanced, and to its great credit that what was political satire just two months ago is now turning into, with the current battles over “reopening,” political reality. The short […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 21, 2020The following interview with director Jim McKay was published during last year’s BAMcinemafest and is being rerun today as his feature En el Séptimo Día is in release from Cinema Guild. The film can currently be seen at the IFC Center in New York and the Laemmle Music Hall in L.A. Many other cities are scheduled over the next two months, including, on Friday, the Roxie in San Francisco. Jim McKay, whose early, mid ’90s/early-aughts features (Girls Town, Our Song, Everyday People and Angel) were empathetic and involving New York dramas suffused with a love of neighborhood and feeling for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 18, 2018After posting last week about the new Amazon Studios, director Jim McKay and I have had an email discussion about this new crowdsourced development entity. There’s been much criticism — from me but many others around the web — of the minimal protections given writers, who grant Amazon an 18-month free option and the right to have the tech giant’s online community give input to and even rewrite their original work. (Read my earlier post here.) Jim isn’t as alarmist as some about the new venture; his take is rather nuanced. Here’s our conversation, reprinted with permission. McKay: I liked […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 23, 2010