d. w. merriman

A romantic comedy is sidetracked by the suicide of the protagonists’s son, forcing the film to become a lyrical meditation on death, suffering, and the perseverance of joy. A spy thriller becomes a surrealist horror as both agents and global criminals reveal themselves as demons of a protagonist’s insanity. A sitcom where one beautiful woman moves in with two beautiful men and one overweight loser refuses to end after its allotted 21 minutes, thereby collapsing the 4th wall and transforming into a documentary on the show’s production team, with the laugh track, camera angles, and style of editing remaining undisturbed. A reality show where 15 contestants vie to gain the most weight in order to win a car and $40,000 becomes a stoner comedy as one man dies from overeating and goes to Hell, where he must abduct the Devil’s wife from the hands of God in order to save his soul and prevent eternal damnation. A documentary chronicling the true life of a Zen monk becomes, at an undistinguished moment, a film about a writer who is imagining the life of a Zen monk, an imagined life which has little to do with principled biography, which remains interspersed throughout the film.