Ray Seiden Movies
Writer-director Loren Marsh's black comedy Invitation to a Suicide - an official selection at the AFI Fest and HBO Comedy Festival - concerns the plight of Kaz Malek, a witless young man raised in a Polish enclave of Brooklyn. In a (very) misguided attempt to escape from his dead-end life as a baker's son, Kaz slyly lifts $10,000 from a Russian mobster, but is promptly caught. The mobster threatens to kill Kaz's father if he can't come up with the payola. To escape from this plight, Kaz devises a wild yet workable scheme: he'll publicly hang himself and sell tickets for the show, thus raising the money to pay off his creditor but dying in honor instead of living in shame over his father's death. To his utter shock, everyone - his father and the Mafioso included - wholeheartedly applauds the idea. But it remains unclear whether Kaz will follow through and off himself. Marsh pulled influence for the film from such classic films as Harold and Maude and King of Hearts. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
Filmmaker James Mangold follows his Oscar-winning drama Girl, Interrupted (1999) with this whimsical fantasy. Meg Ryan stars as Kate McKay, a modern female executive in New York City whose drive to succeed in the cutthroat corporate world has left little time for romance. When her genius ex-boyfriend Stuart (Liev Schreiber) opens a portal in time, the experiment transports Leopold (Hugh Jackman) from 1867 to the present day. A charming bachelor and the royal "Third Duke of Albany" in his own time, Leopold is fascinated by the 21st century. As the courtly Leopold and the decidedly liberated Kate tour the town, a mutual attraction develops into something deeper, a relationship that's threatened by Leopold's temporary chronological status. Kate & Leopold (2001) was originally developed by co-screenwriter Steve Rogers as a project for star/producer Sandra Bullock, who had a hit with his film Hope Floats (1998). ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, (more)
