ultright

My wife introduced me to this movie which pairs well with "Repo Man" and "Apocalypse Now" for coming-of-age films that are not so much moral lessons as practical understandings of The Human Beast. Occultism includes all of the pre-Christian religions as well as modern incarnations like New Thought and Wicca, and might more accurately be called "paganism" once we realize that paganism means "country faiths" and does not have to be the usual Greco-Celtic fetishism. This movie concerns a young lady who is growing into adulthood and needs to learn the hard way that we are not all equal. Some people are just irredeemably bad, and others are basically a labor force that is in the grips of the Dunning-Kruger Effect and can never be trusted to do the right thing. The story follows Sarah Bailey as she moves from San Francisco to the Mulholland Pass area in Los Angeles and tries to find friends at the local Catholic high school, all while exploring "The Craft," sort of a fusion of Wiccan and ceremonial Magick traditions. It is tightly scripted, features a narrative that is not so much good/evil as good-versus-incompetent, and hits on many painful life lessons that we wish remained in high school but are with us in adulthood every day. One of the best movies ever made.

The combination of murder and political intrigue makes for a compelling story told very slowly but with intensity. This is a Nord Noir series that you study, chew like beef jerky, and mull like fine wine. But starting the second season, the committee of MBAs and industry experts took over, and they turn it into a chore of boring churn formula that will send anyone into a disturbed slumber. What I like about the first season is the suspense and fundamental negativity toward (a) social institutions which are based on allegiance and not quality and (b) people who follow procedure (means) but miss the point of stopping a killer (ends).

This film gets a lot of praise, but most of it is for the visual aesthetic and the atmosphere of a hopeless wanderlust which seems to be common in dying civilizations like ours. The story involves simps who create their own problems and then are looking for meaning in each other and by avoiding their own inner needs, which makes them even more shallow than average. The mobster world created by the Hollywood casting couch wizards is as usual overblown, overdramatized, and almost religious in its simplicity. I liked "Miami Vice" and "Manhunter" too but this misses the clarity of purpose that characters had in those, and replaces it with a vapid emotionalization that is little more than fatalistic rationalization of inertia. Beautiful entropy, maybe, but pointless and weak like a Redditor trying to fix a toilet by the light of a cell phone.