Crystal Fairy y el cactus mágico

I am late seeing this flick and I must disagree with a few other reviewers and their take on this very simple yet complex movie.

Once again Sebastián Silva is offering up questions on youth and how youth sees the world around them. Jamie is obviously a self centered person with a limited experience in communicating with others (sort of like the US) (as Jamie is an American) and we can see this in his 'attitude' throughout the story. The other three boys have had to share with others and they try to make the best of their trip to the beach. Jamie, on the other hand insist they do it as planed.

Enter Crystal Fairy into this mix and you already have an altered perception of exactly what they want to do - she is like the drug reduced from the cactus later in the story (she has an altered view of reality). She wants to share everything the three other boys don't seem to mind. Jamie can't tolerate it - he wants none of her.

Crystal mothers them, she wants to know them, the boys are like children to her - yet she is very childlike herself. Jamie suddenly wants to be friends with her but only when he's 'high', after he comes down he's back to his original self. Crystal leaves quietly, Jamie sees her leave and calls her name, Crystal disappears behind a rock.

What is Silva showing us here? Crystal is the personality of many different people, she's giving, caring, willing to accept life on her own and take risks - and being alone isn't easy, she is alone throughout the movie and Jamie thinks she's a phony. Jamie cannot see that he is the phony because in the end Crystal is what Jamie was seeking in the brewed Cactus they drink and even when high he could not accept it.

Michael Cera is Jamie, an American traveler in Chile who plans a road trip with his friends to indulge in a legendary hallucinogen, the San Pedro cactus. While drunk at a party, Jamie invites an eccentric, radical spirit named Crystal Fairy, played by Gaby Hoffmann. When Jamie's insensitive, controlling, impatient, selfish nature is revealed it conflicts with Crystal Fairy, making what was suppose to be a care-free adventure into an uncomfortable journey for everyone.

Michael Cera and Gaby Hoffmann are both very brave for taking on these characters, who are in perfect contrast with one another. The result is excellent performances of well-written characters. Unfortunately the film is going to attract audiences looking for a drug-fueled adventure in the vein of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, not a character-driven comedy lacking any real laugh-out-loud moments. The film is played almost too serious to be any fun, though there is depth.

Writer/director Sebastián Silva proved his powers as a serious filmmaker with Magic Magic, which also starred Cera and was released earlier this year. Other than having Cera in lead roles, the only thing the two films share in common is an abrupt ending that will either leave you haunted or irritated. While Magic Magic is an effective psychological horror film, Crystal Fairy is a thought-provoking character study poorly marketed as an adventure comedy.

Crystal Fairy and The Magical Cactus isn't a bad film but it does fail as a comedy. As for the adventure, the credits begin to roll too soon after the film gets interesting. This will annoy more than it will amuse or enlighten.

Michael Cera goes a long way toward changing his lovable doofus image in this road trip movie with a laid back and ultimately rather sweet vibe.

Cera plays an obnoxious American vacationing in Chile who's trying to chase down a special kind of cactus that has mind-altering capabilities when the juice is distilled and drunk. Along for the ride are three native Chilean brothers and another American, a hippie-dippie girl named Crystal Fairy. The Chileans are quiet, polite and tolerant while the Americans are both unpleasant, Cera because he's a jerk and Crystal Fairy because she tries too hard. If this had stayed yet another Americans-behaving-badly movie I wouldn't have liked it. But it goes a very different, and welcome, direction, as the group's time together causes defenses to be relaxed and vulnerabilities to emerge.

"Crystal Fairy" does a great job of capturing that unique dynamic that evolves when a random assortment of people spend a lot of time together on a road trip. The characters created by Cera and Gaby Hoffman (who plays Crystal Fairy) certainly aren't pleasant to spend time with for much of the film's running time, but they're so like people I've actually known that it's fascinating to watch their performances and how thoroughly they can create characters that feel so authentic.

I was already won over by the film's casual, relaxed atmosphere by the time the last few scenes came around, and then, after a late-act revelation and the sensitive way in which the film handles it, decided that I had sort of fallen in love with it.

Grade: A

Crystal Fairy is one of the most pointless films I think I've ever watched. It's not trying to be avant-garde and it's not trying to be mainstream, it lingers somewhere inbetween without reason. It has little story, with no plot and hence, goes nowhere from the start. Michael Cera is somewhat fun to watch, but the film as a whole has no motive to make you enjoy it. I can see where the film wanted to go, this exotic road trip, but it fails so many times that it feels like you are watching an idea that could have been unfold into this series of pointless images.

Crystal Fairy and The Magic Cactus is one of those boring films with no substance to give you anything to keep you watching. Michael Cera is possibly the only reason for you to pick this movie up with no other big names.

Hiding behind masks that cover their vulnerability, two Americans in Chile, Jamie (Michael Cera) and Crystal Fairy, a young free-spirited woman (Gaby Hoffmann), spar off against each other in Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva's psychedelic comedy Crystal Fairy. The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and won the Directing Award for World Cinema at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Jamie's act is one of controlling, overly-aggressive behavior but not quite the "Ugly American," while Crystal's is the opposite but equally phony, a caricature of a "hippie" filled with love for everyone who spouts clichés about chakras and mother earth, walks around her hotel room naked, engages in healing rituals, and chides the others for eating junk food.

It's hard to tell if the director is using her persona as a means of ridiculing these ideas or just showing how inauthentic she is. In any event, Crystal and Jamie's way of being, while it fills a need for them, has costs in sacrificing who they really are. On the surface, the film is a road trip to find a psychedelic substance in the San Pedro cactus plant which, when boiled for twelve hours and ingested, has the properties of mescaline (it has been said that the actors used mescaline while shooting the film). In essence, however, the film is not really about mescaline but about releasing rigid patterns of behavior and discovering new ways of interacting that are more fulfilling.

The film begins at a party where Silva's hand-held camera-work and improvised conversation is established. On a cocaine high, the caustic Jamie invites a partygoer, a girl who calls herself Crystal Fairy to accompany him and his friends on a quest to repeat the spiritual high described in Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception. When Crystal takes him up on the offer the next day (which he has forgotten that he even made), he is dismayed by her annoying behavior, even though his Chilean friends, Champa (Juan Andres Silva) and his two brothers Lel (Jose Miguel Silva) and Pilo (Augustin Silva), seem more tolerant, perhaps because at least one does not understand English. Their trip to the ocean to locate and purchase a piece of the San Pedro cactus from reluctant residents is one of the comic highlights of the film, even though Jamie has to eventually use surreptitious means to acquire it.

Crystal Fairy ends up in a good place even though it is more than a little irritating in getting there. During the trip, Jamie and Crystal talk to each other, but at cross purposes. The results are unpredictable but, suffice it to say, their longing for a spiritual experience does not take the form that Huxley described. Michael Cera's role is out of character from the lovable, nerdy self he has played in earlier movies, but he is terrific in this film, totally natural and very real, as is Hoffmann in her role, both continuing to reveal a new dimension to their character. Ultimately, the group's sharing about their fears and their discovery of how their act no longer serves their purpose in life is more open and honest than anything I've seen in films recently and stays in the memory.