Paul Thomas Anderson
2012
138 minutes
This movie reminds you of the time you actually got pulled aside by the Scientology folks to take a "stress test" when you were on a visit to Toronto. You had already read all about the hidden secrets of Scientology from one volume of the William Poundstone Big Secrets book series and you were an obnoxious punk just out of your teens at the time, so you were eager to fuck around with them.
The man who administered your stress test was exactly the sort of person you could imagine would be wrangling aspiring vulnerable potential cult trainees. He eagerly explained to you the benefits of Scientology with a mix of scientific and new age meditative thoughtful language as he handed you some soup can looking lie detector mumbo jumbo things to hold onto and then proceeded to ask you some alarmingly personal questions. You found yourself answering these questions with various degrees of honesty. You were a bit horrified at how easily they pried some personal details out of you with their hard-sell technique, even mixed in with some of the glib bullshit answers that you gave.
In the end the man asked if you had any further questions. He quite easily swatted away your usual questions about whether they were a cult or a religion or what their deal was, since they regularly expect to deal with that. He had friendly answers for all the usual concerns. He started getting quite a bit testier when you started asking about the Sea Org, denying that he knew anything about that, and then started to turn considerably more hostile when you asked about Xenu and volcanos and other hidden aspects of their lore that were much less public in those days. Eventually you scooted away, slightly worried that you had landed your name on some kind of Scientology shit list.
In the end you walked away from the experience concluding that the target audience for the whole endeavor seemed to be lonely immigrants who were having trouble adjusting and making friends. Even your casual observations indicated there was no shortage of people like that in Toronto in those days.
Time to choose something different: