John Merriman
Human lives grappling with all the flavors of exstential despair intersect in a deadpan collage of comic suffering.
After his girlfriend dumps him at a New Year's Eve party, Bill and his friends drive to an off-season beach town to win her back.
Ellie is a 27-year old whose life is far from where she imagined it to be. Filled with annoying friends, a self-involved boyfriend, and a career that she can’t bring herself to pursue, Ellie feels detached from her life. When she learns that her estranged alcoholic father has died, her world is disrupted and she begins a journey that takes her to a small town in Texas. While dealing with the logistical arrangements of her father’s death Ellie has to confront what happens when the structures and safety nets we build for ourselves come undone.
Allie moves to Texas and embraces the slower pace of life and gun culture. She tries to maintain healthy relationships as the weapons she uses to protect herself lead her to a paranoid withdrawal from life.
Working at a movie theater is fun, and that's why Mason, Dennis, and Gabe have done it for years. But, those years of neglecting the world outside the theater are finally catching up to them. Now, they have to make a decision: start on the long, hard path to maturity or stay at the theater, where they can avoid customers, screw with customers, and eat as much popcorn as they desire.
Recovering from an ill-fated affair with a married man, Gabe finds solace in the relationship he maintains with his ex-wife and daughter. On the other side of town, Ernesto evades life at home with his current live-in ex-boyfriend by spending much of his spare time in the hospital with an ailing past love. Impervious to the monotony of their blue-collar world, they maintain an unwavering yearning for romance. The emotional isolation the two men have grown accustomed to is captured in a subtle, optimistic, poetic fashion while avoiding melodrama.
After being dumped and fired on the same day, Marie, a maid, gets a job cleaning up after an overworked businessman and the aggressively messy roommate he’s forgotten about, sending her into a surreal world of candy, insult comics, and pretend marriages.
Children and nature shine in this melancholy love story about Johnny, a male nanny who tries to win back his girlfriend after she takes up with a man who looks just like him. The film tracks the growth of the relationship over four seasons in New England, as Johnny’s emotional problems sabotage his attempts to put together a family like the one he takes care of. A drama with the humor of spring and the sorrow of winter, YOU HURT MY FEELINGS speaks with the honesty of a child about people struggling to let go of darkness and find love.
Set on the eve of Flatland's first mission into their 'outer-space,' the story presents the intriguing mysteries of triangles with angle sums greater than 180 degrees and flipping into dimensions that are literally out of this world.
A woman takes part in a sleep study to determine why she is not sleeping well. Winner of the Audience Award at the Austin Film Festival.
Gretchen has bigger problems than abysmal fashion sense: She's 17, painfully awkward and stuck in the most unforgiving place on earth - high school. When her obsession with school bad boy Ricky gets out of hand, her mother sends her to an emotional treatment center to recover. She has to travel elsewhere, however, to truly begin to understand why she fixates on the wrong kind of guy.
An awkward teenager wrestles with whether or not to let her boyfriend go up her shirt.
When perpetually disgruntled twentysomething Hunter Reeves is fired from a chain bookstore, his best chance at regaining some semblance of financial security is by offering himself to Pharmakhem, which, despite being exactly the type of pharmaceutical conglomerate Hunter is prone to despise, is paying good money for human test subjects. Along with his fellow unemployed friends Nicki and Greg, Hunter agrees to set aside his most recent Noam Chomsky book and swallow an experimental anti-depressant. Unlike Prozac, however, this drug doesn't encourage proper brain chemistry as much as it induces stupidity. Ignorance really is bliss for Hunter; while he finds himself increasingly unconcerned with the state of the world, he's also becoming progressively dumber.
