"Breaking Habits" on Hoopla

This is officially described as a documentary but it is like a regular movie with a plot that moves along like fiction.

It's the story of Christine Meeusen, who eventually founds "Sisters of the Valley," which is a group of women who produce marijuana medicinals. Christine was a married woman with kids whose husband stayed home and took care of the children and house. Also the bookkeeping for Christine's business, which soon became a million dollar business way back then.

However, Christine finds out her cute little husband has been stealing all the money, so she dumps him and goes to stay with her brother. The brother becomes the "dad figure," but he, too, is a jerk and starts running some type of side hustle based on Christine's business.

As the movie points out, Christine is insistent on her business being legal at every step of the way. This is the marijuana medicinal business (not her original million dollar business). You can see she is a very capable, thorough businesswoman.

And because she is so capable, it doesn't bother her in the least to be done with men, so she announces that she is going to form her own sisterhood. When she does this, numerous other women ask to join her and they all go in on producing marijuana medicinals.

Unfortunately she lives in Merced County, CA, one of the poorest and most conservative counties in CA. Yes, marijuana is legal but only for personal use. One is allowed only so many plants (NJ must have modeled their law on CA's because that is what we have).

The problem is that in Merced County, they have a sheriff who looks and acts like he's out of the wild West. He does not believe that people can resist the profit motive and that they will consistently grow plants for profit. He outlines the profit from a marijuana plant, as does Christine in another segment of the movie. The movie shows "busts" the sheriff makes and how plants are hidden by the growers. So to an extent, the sheriff is right: people will exceed their number of plants because of the profit motive.

Christine, however, is different because she is so insistent on doing everything by the book in terms of adhering to state and county regulations, as well as IRS. This does not deter the sheriff, however, who is constantly dropping by for a visit and a look at her plants.

I'll say no more in the interest of your own pursuit of the denouement.

The film generally gets good reviews but it is criticized for jumpy editing. I did not find this to be a problem in the least, but I am always pausing, getting up to get some project to work on while I watch, etc., so that might be why.

Finally--watch for the scene where Christine gets into it with the local pastor who wants to know if she's accepted Christ as her Savior. Since Sisters of the Valley has nothing to do with religion, she doesn't want to get into it with him. How she dumps him is classic iin "people handling." But it's also "don't walk away mad, just walk away."