Alchemy

Attended the world premier at Tribeca Film Festival, what a great event for Downtown NYC. Sarah Chalke is fantastic as female lead in this movie, perfect casting. The story is sweet, the dialog is fast and witty without going over the top into NY sarcasm. Tom Cavanaugh does a wonderful job as the lead. The the supporting cast is excellent. Ileana Douglas, Celeste Holm, James Barbour are all great. Nadia Dajani's performance will be talked about by everyone as the quick comeback, cynical, heart of gold editor.

The audience was treated to several belly laughs, not easy to do with a NYC audience. The various locations around NYC gave the movie a terrific backdrop for a story that can't be told without great acting and well written script. There are so many good lines in this movie that anybody who sees it will be repeating for years.

Overall, an excellent and very well done movie with terrific music to boot. A little surprised that it was an independent film.

5 August 2006. For those who really enjoyed this movie, do I have a much better one to suggest - Electric Dreams (1984). Even those it's 20 years old, this older movie has the soundtrack as well as a nice romantic comedy script that really touches the heart and goes to the essence of the artificial intelligence controversy. Alchemy, unfortunately seems forced, even though more likely scientifically more plausible than Electric Dreams or A.I., the need to introduce and change the rules of the game in favor the computer program makes for a rather dissonant and artificial flavor ironically. The comedy seems forced. The overall plot and the essence of the movie is decent, it just doesn't have the fun and magic that Electric Dreams had. Five out of Ten Stars.

My wife and I both thought this was a well written enjoyable movie. The dialog was very funny and the actors did a great job with it. We did not know the lead actor Tom Cavanagh, but it is obvious he is going to be well known in the future. If you watch movies to have a good time than this is a movie for you. Judging by some movies we have seen lately, many people watch movies because they need to feel more depressed. If this movie had big names associated with it then it would have had a large gross, assuming that the big names would have done as good a job as the current actors. We see a lot of small (indy?)films with big names that get excellent reviews for horrible movies. The reviewers are obviously faking it. They should have thrown some well deserved good reviews at this one.

Just caught this in its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. At the Q&A after, someone in the audience described this movie perfectly -- it's the kind of comedy Hollywood used to make so well, before the movies started drowning in their own stupidity. "Alchemy" is laugh- out-loud funny, immensely charming, a whole lot of fun, and -- amazingly enough -- doesn't insult your intelligence! Not much else to say about it, other than that (like my favorite documentary, "Spellbound") it's a movie that absolutely everyone should and will enjoy. Will be very curious to see how many millions this movie makes when the general public gets to see it.

Oh, and one other thing -- Tom Cavanagh (from "Ed") as "Jerry", the gay French computer program (you'll know what I mean when you see it)....Hilarious!!

This is one of the worse movies I have ever seen. It reminded me of a bad pilot that never got picked up and instead got crammed into a poor excuse of a film. The story was stupid, the characters were shallow and not likable, and the jokes would not land. If you took Tom Cavanah out of this movie, it would have a below zero rating, but I have to admit he did an OK job considering how horrible the script was. This was the worse thing in the Tribeca Film festival (I saw home videos that turned out better than this). Do not see this movie unless you are a teenage girl who likes sappy, unsophisticated, not believable, and shallow material.