By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Sebastián Silva
Starring: Agustin Silva | Gaby Hoffman | José Miguel Silva | Juan Andrés Silva | Michael Cera
Original language title: Crystal Fairy y el cactus mágico
Country: chile
Year: 2013
Running time: 98
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2332579/combined
Chris says: “At the very least, CRYSTAL FAIRY features two irrefutably memorable, if supremely irritating characters, both of them twenty-something Americans in Chile. The first, Jamie (Michael Cera) babbles on pretentiously about The Doors of Perception and harbors an obsession towards the San Pedro cactus, a regional plant with hallucinatory powers. The second, the film’s titular figure (Gaby Hoffmann) is a self-described ‘radical spirit’ and, as Jamie soon discovers, a grade-A loon. After meeting at a party, a coked-up Jamie asks her to join him, his friend and his friend’s two brothers (all capably played by director Sebastián Silva’s relatives) on a road trip to find the elusive San Pedro cactus and partake of it on the beach. After an auspiciously terrible first ten minutes, the film settles into a nice, if rambling groove as the road trip commences. Hoffmann is a compelling annoyance, up there with any Mike Leigh heroine or Shelley Duvall kook—it’s fun watching Jamie and the others bounce off her abrasive hippy-dippy nature. At times like Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN but without the sex, social commentary or much of an emotional arc, this is a completely unexpected follow-up to Silva’s acclaimed film THE MAID: likable, but a tad unsatisfying as a whole. It was made in tandem with another Silva-directed, Cera-starring feature, MAGIC MAGIC, which I can only hope has a little more depth and shape to it. 3 cats
“(This film screened at the 2013 Provincetown International Film Festival).”