My Duck Is Dead

A girl brings home her latest boyfriend to meet her parents. This is done against the background of random shootings that had just begun in NYC at the time the play was written. How the family's failings are magnified by the social confusion of the times is the crux of the plot.

Succinct yet long-winded, hilariously unsettling, this black black black comedy is delicious the first time around, coming at you like ray of light through a keyhole five rooms away. And it gets better with multiple viewings. Elliot Gould is a tousled, endearing anti-hero and Donald Sutherland gives perhaps the best screen performance EVER of an existentialist minister with a bad haircut and a fondness for the phrase `all right.' Sometimes, when my mind wanders over the film, I'll remember a scene, a line, and everything is suddenly all right.