Alchemy



Alchemy was released in 2005 when computers and online dating and texting were just becoming a new fad. The movie is about a computer science professor who is in trouble of losing his position at the college he teaches at if he does publish his new experiment.

            Mal Downey (Tom Cavanagh) is the troubled computer teacher. In order to save his job and gain tenure the college tells him he must do an experiment and to somehow get it published... he has two weeks to complete the experiment. The premise of the experiment is can someone fall in love with a computer. Mal hires a professor Troy Rollins who is an expert on love and a girl named Samantha (Sarah Chalke). Samantha has to date both Troy and the computer. Mal has Samantha converse with the computer at first but then things needed to be turned up.

            Mal is publishing his article through a magazine his ex- girlfriend runs. The ex- girlfriend tells him that he has to somehow disguise himself and give an image to the computer. She has the magazine make a disguise for Mal to pass as a Frenchman named Jerry (which is the computer’s name). He will do everything that the computer tells him to say. Jerry has a very one sided emotion.  

            Samantha likes some qualities in both the real man and the computer man but she can no longer keep up with dating two men at the same time.

            Things eventually become nuts with Mal, Troy, and the computer confessing their love for Samantha.

            For those of you who have watched Scrubs you will enjoy watching Alchemy. Tom Cavanagh and Sarah Chalke have very good chemistry. They are not crazy like they were on Scrubs as Dan and Eliot but their funniness and their chemistry carries over into the movie. The whole cast is really good all the characters are a bit crazy. Celeste Holm is a panic as Mal’s grandmother. She keeps pestering him about being home on a Saturday night and if he has a girlfriend.

            I used to watch Scrubs so I liked Chalke and Cavanagh I was happy to see them as the main stars of the film but they were not the reasons why I wanted to see Alchemy. In the movie Samantha has a friend named Marissa who is played by Anna Belknap. Belknap is the reason why I watched this movie. If you do not know who Belknap is she plays Lindsay Monroe on CSI: NY (I am a FANATIC CSI: NY fan and a diehard Danny/Lindsay ‘shipper so if you are not a D/L fan or hate Lindsay Monroe as a character keep your comments to yourself or feel my wrath!!!). I adore her as an actress. I find her outrageously cute in the movie even though she is only in it for a total of five minutes.

            Alchemy has a great independent feel to it. I tend to find independent movies or as I like to call them “movies no one has ever seen” to be smarter and more clever. The cast is made up of actors that are not too well known unless maybe you watch certain TV shows or “movies that no one has ever seen” and are into the actors and actresses in it (Celeste Holm is the exception she has had a very long film career).

            The story is perfect for this age of computers where people are more comfortable chatting to someone they most likely will never meet. Each one of us has that someplace online be it a message board or Facebook or Twitter where we kind of let ourselves go and pour some of true selves out (look at me: I started this blog to be a movie nerd and I will admit I belong to two message boards for CSI: NY as well as some other shows). I really liked the aspect of Samantha dating two men who just so happened to have the qualities she was looking for in one man: Troy was charming and romantic but he never shut up while Jerry was really sweet and would listen to what she had to say but he was just really one sided.

            Alchemy is a good movie. The humor may be a bit dull to some. I suggest watching Alchemy if you ever come across it on TV.