MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Michael Radny 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.

dan-2598 I liked the idea of this film. It sounded cool and fun. Something I might have liked to have done years ago (and maybe part of me still would). I'm not going to comment on the acting or cinematography - it was all good from my humble perspective. Certainly the characters were believable and realistic.This film is about the characters. However the story that holds the film together is, as you will know, about a young American male (named Jamie) who is in Chile - most likely, based on his persona in the film, with a primary aim of sampling the San Pedro cactus and the hallucinogenic substance mescaline which it contains. He appears to have a friend who is from the area, who is his link to the country, as he speaks no Spanish himself. We are not sure if he is visiting his friend, or if he is living or studying in the country. Either way, he goes off on his spiritual quest with his friend, his friend's 2 brothers and a girl whom he spontaneously invited while high at a party.The main character is incredibly insensitive throughout. At the start of the movie, it seems that he regretted inviting the girl when setting off with his friends, and rather callously states that they can just leave her behind if she starts to annoy them. As they progress on their journey in travelling to a town to get the cactus, moving on to their chosen spot to prepare and imbibe the cactus, experience the effects of it and come down again, their characters are explored. From the start, the main character made me cringe. I think it might be because I could see some aspects of myself from the past in him, which I did not like. He was quite insensitive with a somewhat superior attitude towards others, and was more interested in pursuing with his goal rather than getting to know people on the way. Actually he almost seemed desperate with his goal of taking mescaline. The irony is that he appears to have gained his knowledge (at least of mescaline) from reading Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" (a typical read for the Western teenage drug-user and bedroom philosopher).In the movie he is driven by his desire to sample this cactus, and is quite insulting towards others on the way. A key scene to highlight this is when a lady invites them into her home to see if she wants to give them some of her cactus, and the main character (Jamie) sneaks into her garden, cuts off a portion of the cactus, puts it in their car and then returns, telling his friends it's time to go. Although his friends appeared to laugh when they saw the cactus in the back of the car and perhaps appreciated his initiative, it probably added to their feeling of him being an "asshole", which they only call him when he is rude towards their female travelling companion, Crystal Fairy.The actual drug-taking sequence is interesting from a preparation point of view. In terms of the drug effects, when Jamie begins to appear to experience heightened levels of anxiety and paranoia, there is a feeling of him deserving this and a hope that perhaps the experience will teach the viewer why he is the way he is, and that it will make him a better person. This doesn't really happen however.A key difference between Jamie and the Crystal Fairy is her new age/spiritual attitude versus his perhaps more typical attitude of a well-off white rather naive indelicate Western male. I disagree with the previous reviewer who stated that they were both equally phony, with Crystal Fairy spouting clichés and being a caricature of a hippy. As least she is following a path in life that she seems to believe in, and seems friendly and respectful towards others. I agree that Jamie seems phony, though I don't think he is deliberately so. He is rather narrowed in his views and self-centred. His understanding of certain topics seems superficial and gleaned from books. He quickly stands out from his friends for being more forward, less relaxed and less "cool", and perhaps somewhat socially inept and missing the subtleties of communication.Crystal Fairy, on the other hand, might be a little more deliberate in creating her hippie-esque persona. We only really see this at the end, when she informs the group as they are sitting round the campfire on their comedown, that she was raped whilst at a party some time in the past. She also adds that she is a dominatrix. This leaves the viewer wondering if these things are connected, and that perhaps her hippie portrayal is some kind of reaction against what happened.Anyway, back to the title of my review. When the film was over, I kind of felt that I wasn't left satisfied by the film. The end is perhaps slightly squeezed in and anti-climatic. Sure, Jamie and Crystal Fairy kiss and make up - there's a surprise - could see that coming a mile off. There wasn't a huge focus on the drug experience itself - the viewer simply follows them from the outside. I suppose I was disappointed that the characters weren't changed in a more significant way than they were - or, more specifically, Jamie. His brief moment of enlightenment where he apologises to Crystal Fairy and then cries after her sorry story seems rather superficial and short- lived. This point is driven home by one of the closing line of the movie, spoken by Jamie - "she didn't see any faces in the mountain". This appeared to be spoken with some deeper meaning, though I struggle to see what it is. Perhaps someone else can enlighten me.Watch the film.

Turfseer Chilean writer/director Sebastián Silva was successful with his auspicious 2009 debut, 'The Maid'. But here, with his sophomore effort, Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus, he proffers up a real vanity project, marked by an air of unmistakable self-indulgence. Joining him in this slight affair is Michael Cera, whose star power obviously got the film bankrolled. Cera plays Jamie, an obnoxious version of himself. He finds himself at a party with a friend, Champa, in Santiago, Chile, where he scores some cocaine and boasts about his knowledge of Aldous Huxley's 'Doors of Perception'. He soon runs into Crystal Fairy, a hippie, earth-mother type, who isn't shy about disrobing in later scenes and showing off her hairy armpits. Jaime insults Crystal about her dancing abilities and jokingly mentions that he and his friend (along with his two brothers) will be taking a three hour trip to score some San Pedro cacti and its by-product: pure mescaline; it's mainly Jaime's plan, who intends to imbibe the psychedelic substance, at the beaches of the Atacama desert. Much to Jaime's chagrin, while driving to the town up north where they'll be looking for the cactus, Crystal calls and surprisingly informs Jaime that she'll be meeting him and the boys in town. Jaime ramps up his overbearing demeanor, as the group knocks on the doors of residents who have large stalks of San Pedro cacti, growing in their front yards. None of the residents seem to be interested in giving Jaime and his posse a piece so Jaime simply cuts off one and the group doesn't seem to be upset by his immoral actions.When the group finally arrives at the seashore, Crystal goes off by herself, communing with nature and Jaime boils some cactus and gets high on the mescaline. I understand that Cera actually did get high during the filming but none of his dreamy 'trips' are illustrated visually—he merely parades around the beach, making an ass of himself, as he did before. Later, during a campfire, Crystal reveals that she was raped, after being led away from some kind of new age gathering she was attending. Crystal also reveals that she works as a dominatrix, which doesn't seem to perturb any of Jaime's pals. As for the Chilean group, they really have little to do throughout the film, except ensure that Jaime, doesn't get too out of hand.Somewhere there's a solid, well-developed story here, but most of the lines are improvised and everything ends up rambling. Some judicious editing could have improved the story quite a bit, but Mr. Silva was probably having too much fun during the shooting of the film, to think about that. Silva has an ear for dialogue and certainly the Chilean landscape will keep your eyes glued to the screen. The aim here was obviously for comedy but unfortunately Cera's character is so unsympathetic, that we care little about any of this machinations, along with his Chilean compatriots, whom he took along for the ride.

evanston_dad 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