I love The Craft. I love everything about it- the soundtrack is amazing (it's almost all covers, though I didn't know it at the time - "How Soon Is Now", "I Have the Touch", "Dangerous Type", "Dark Secret" and "Witches Song" would shape me in ways that I didn't understand until later), the wardrobe is all the best parts of the 90's and the lines are awesome ("Everything I touch turns to shit," A. and I would wail to each other in secret high school notes). Fairuza Balk is a Real Life Wiccan who went on to own a Real Life Witch Store of her own and in the 90's, it was the first film that I saw that took any care to even attempt to get a witchcraft consultant (Pat Devin) from an actual person who does witchcraft.
Was it perfect? Of course not. It's sort of like Practical Magic in that once we get past "The Lime in the Coconut"/Midnight Margarita scene I lose a lot of interest until the last scene. Here, once the dead sharks start showing up on the beach, I get very ehhhhhhh about it. Are there big character development issues? You betcha!
We started to put on the movie (which I haven't seen in a couple of years) when Jow semi-jokingly suggested we use flying ointment to watch it. I thought about it. Wasn't this a ritual? The place where Jow, A. and I all spent our formulative years? Didn't we have candles, pumpkin donuts and pumpkin beer? What would I discover if we watched it ritualistically? We all rubbed on the ointment.
"This is why I became a witch," I said off-handedly as the credits started to roll. A., while not a witch herself, has been to circles and has been dealing with my crazy ass for almost half her life and has picked up a decent amount by attrition. Naturally, A. started laughing like an asshole.
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I Was Always This Cool in My Head at Sixteen[/caption]"What?" I said. "Look, I can give you some kind of bullshit answer about how I was called by the gods or I'm a heredity witch whose family has been doing this for eleventybillion years or that I rejected Christianity from a young age and had been a dirt worshipping heathen au naturale since I was a small child or I could tell you the truth. And the truth is, I wanted this. It took a few years to realize it, but this is where the seed got planted. I wanted sisters to be close to (but not turn on me), I wanted to dress like a modern goth school girl punk rock princess and I wanted cool shit to happen. I wanted to do magic. I wanted to feel powerful and feel that level of joy and see it plain in the universe like they did."
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Nothing Like Any Magic I Would Ever Get to Do[/caption]