I'm sort of scared right now.
I'm typing this on an airplane headed from Savannah, Ga., to Charlotte, N.C., where I'm supposed to catch a flight home to Little Rock. If all goes well I'll be back in Arkansas later this [Tuesday] morning and will be able to work on the section you're now looking at on your iPad screen.
The only problem is that our flight was held up for about 40 minutes because there was fog in Charlotte this morning (isn't there fog in Charlotte every morning?) and they'd stopped flights from landing there. So we went back to the gate, and they told us we could get off if we wanted to try to rebook through another city. Two people did.
Then, the pilot told us we'd be flying to Charlotte after all, so we rolled back on the runway and took off. By my calculations, we'll have about 10 minutes to catch our flight. Which is close but not impossible unless our gate is on the other side of the airport. (It has been a while but I have sprinted through the Charlotte airport.)
If we miss the flight, the next flight from Charlotte to Little Rock is at 6:30 p.m. and is probably full. Most likely they'll book us on another route through Dallas or Chicago. That would probably get us home mid-afternoon.
This mightn't seem like such a big deal to you, and it really isn't. Worst case scenario -- the worst-case scenario that I allow myself to think about anyway, the actual worst case involves meteors and flying zombie monkeys with chainsaws -- is I'll have to work pretty late tonight to catch up with everything for this week's section. And the best-case scenario is that we'll make our connecting flight with a couple of minutes to spare.
Not much is at stake, but I'm tense and anxious. That's why I pulled out my iPad to start writing this column. I might be writing and editing in airports all day (why didn't I take a laptop or at least a Bluetooth keyboard? iPads are great for most things, but touchscreens are lousy for writing and editing) and I'm not sure I can afford to waste any time today.
I'm a bundle of nerves. I don't understand why some people actually pay for this kind of an experience.
In a horror movie, at least on an intellectual level, you know you are safe and that nothing bad is likely to happen to you in the theater. (Leaving aside the various meteor/monkey scenarios that haunt us all.) But your lizard brain doesn't know that, your lizard brain is all flight or fight, just freaking terrified back at the old medulla oblongata. When you go to see a horror movie, you're playing a practical joke on an innocent and vulnerable part of yourself, you bullies. (Wouldn't it be great if I could make myself wet my pants from fear?)
But people like horror movies. They're relatively cheap to make. And it's late October.
"Spell" is opening today -- and by today I mean when you're reading this, not today when I'm sweating out whether we're going to make our connection or not. I know almost nothing about it other than it's set in Appalachia (a good place to set scary stories) even though it was shot in South Africa. It's directed by a British guy, a former DJ named Mark Tonderai who made the low-budget horror film "Hush" in 2009.
You probably don't remember "Hush" but you might be familiar with its follow-up "House at the End of the Street," which was shot in 2010 but didn't get a theatrical release until 2012 after its star Jennifer Lawrence blew up big. (Lawrence shot "House at the End of the Street" in August and September 2010, several months after "Winter's Bone" was released.)
"Spell" is the first film Tonderai has directed since "House at the End of the Street," which is the third movie in which Lawrence starred in 2012. (The other two are "The Hunger Games" and "Silver Linings Playbook." She's made a lot of movies since.)
The plot synopsis of "Spell" informs us it's about Marquis, (Omari Hardwick) who crashes his plane on the way to his father's funeral (talk about your less-than-ideal scenarios) and wakes up "wounded, alone and trapped in Ms. Eloise's (Loretta Devine) attic, who claims she can nurse him back to health with the Boogity, a Hoodoo figure she has made from his blood and skin." Creepy. (And reminiscent of Stephen King's "Misery" and the second season of "Riviera," streaming on Sundance Now.)
We probably will not have a review of "Spell," but we should have one of "Come Play," the other horror film opening this week. Not having internet access at the moment, I have not yet received Piers Marchant's review, though he did answer an email I sent him asking if the movie was "any good at all" by saying it was "not bad, actually ... made pretty carefully." I wonder if the publicists will pull that quote for their ads.
As I read Fandango, (which is pretty poor, I admit) that's all that's going into theaters this week, but, as usual, the streaming options are formidable. Sticking with the horror genre, "His House," which premieres today on Netflix, stars Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku as a Sudanese refugee couple encountering horrors in London. Roald Dahl's "The Witches," based on his 1983 children's book about an Alabama orphan boy transformed into a mouse by a coven of modern-day witches, has a lot of star power both behind -- Robert Zemeckis directs from a screenplay co-written by Kenya Barris ("black-ish") and Guillermo del Toro -- and in front of the camera: Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Chris Rock and Stanley Tucci. It's available on HBO Max.
If you want to try something more esoteric, you might check out -- on virtualavalon.org and afisilver.afi.com -- "Coming Home Again," Wayne Wang's latest project, based on Chang-rae Lee's 1995 New Yorker essay about returning home to South Korea to care for his dying mother. Wang, who has done big Hollywood projects such as "The Joy Luck Club" and not-bad "Because of Winn-Dixie," handles these understated but emotionally freighted stories well.
Anyway, we made it -- I'm finishing up this column safe at home now, with internet access that allows me to fact-check my details. But it was scary for a couple of hours there.
I still don't understand why someone would pay to feel like that.
Email:
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