I'm killing time in the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, irritated that my 3:15 flight back to the city has been delayed by at least an hour and a half by the snowstorm in Chicago, and further irritated that the airport's wi-fi access, which was free the last time I flew out of here, is now for-charge.
As long as I've got the post-holiday I-just-want-to-get-home grumps (and obviously I don't have any Chicago theater news), I thought I'd share the two things that irritated me the most over my stay here this week. (Don't worry, family, neither of them is about you.)
On Christmas Eve, we got to talking about the award-season movies that are coming out. I mentioned that I really wanted to see Juno. Turns out my sister did too, as did my mom. My dad… could be dragged along. Based on the ads we'd all seen proclaiming "Everywhere This Christmas," we figured we'd be able to see it this week. That's why we were so confused when there was no sign of Juno in the Fayetteville paper's movie listings on Christmas day. I got online to do a little research and discovered that "Everywhere This Christmas" was A HUGE LIE.
According to the actual release schedule, the closest place we could see Juno this week was Tulsa, 100 miles away. Markets as minor as Memphis, Grand Rapids, and Des Moines have to wait until January 4. There's no telling when Northwest Arkansas might get it. I was so peeved that I actually spent part of my day digging up an email address for the Fox Searchlight press rep assigned to Juno and writing a letter of complaint. No response yet, nor did I expect to get one, but seriously Fox Searchlight, WTF is your definition of "everywhere?" Watching TV last night before bed, I saw another commercial for the movie that announced, "Now Playing Everywhere!" I nearly threw my shoe at the television.
If that experience renewed my indignity about the way the "flyover states" are marginalized, the other made me wish my hometown could retain a little more provinciality (possibly not a real word, but I don't care). Everytime I return to Northwest Arkansas, it looks more and more like a suburb without the urb. The landscape along the interstate between the airport and my parents' house is increasingly occupied by squat little prefab chain restaurants and big-box stores, each of them an island surrounded by its own parking-lot moat. When I moved away less than a decade ago, NWA didn't even have an Olive Garden; now it has a Fuddrucker's, P.F. Chang's and Ruth's Chris, not to mention the Starbucks that have finally begun their invasion.
As weird as all of this is for a prodigal son, none of it seemed truly offensive—not until my parents and I visited the new mall in Rogers yesterday. The Pinnacle Hills Promenade is an outdoor mall that's styled like a big phony Main Street; it's organized into "avenues" and "lanes," and customers stroll the sidewalks and cross the "streets" while vehicles drive through. Of course, there aren't many genuine Main Streets that are stocked exclusively with national chains like Borders, Sephora and Hollister, not to mention that the whole shebang is situated in the middle of a sea of parking alongside I-540. I'm not necessarily against the stores represented, but the presentation is such a perversion of actual city life that I found myself almost irrationally pissed off by the whole thing. It's a pedestrian experience for people who aren't used to sidewalks, and I could tell by the way everyone was underdressed and shivering in the 45-degree weather that they were only used to being outside for as long as it took to get from the car to the door.
I worry that the explosive growth of the area (NWA metro was the sixth-fastest growing metropolitan statistical area in the country in a study a few years ago) is only going to render my once-quirky Arkansas hometown increasingly indistinguishable from Schaumburg, Illinois. But if it's going to turn into Everycity, USA, then why can't the brand-new stadium-seating multiplex at least get the freaking movie my family wants to see?
Juno finally comes out tomorrow.
Posted by: Julie | January 03, 2008 at 11:26 PM