As an actor, Josh Kornbluth is angling to be the next Jon Lovitz. Even if his balding, spherical head and rotund body weren't so familiar, his half-defeated, half-buoyant "I know I'm a loser, but ain't I still cute?" shtick would ring all the necessary bells. But as a writer-director, he can't quite decide if he wants to be Woody Allen, Spalding Gray, or Hal Hartley. His debut movie Haiku Tunnel, a comedy co-written and co-directed by brother Jacob Kornbluth, veers between influences in telling the story of a commitment-phobic office temp, also named Josh Kornbluth, who is asked to "go perm" after one hyper-efficient day at a law firm. Seeing his attachment-free temp life under siege, he begins semi-consciously sabotaging his career. Kornbluth devotes his energies to surreptitiously writing a novel, spends his pre-dawn hours leaving lengthy voicemail messages about the novel and his life for his firm's head secretary, and notably fails to send out 17 "very important letters," which sit on or in his desk for excruciating days on end, when they aren't falling victim to some calamity. But his supposedly demonic boss never takes him to task, and Kornbluth never panics and tries to intercept or erase the incriminating voicemail. Haiku Tunnel has a habit of setting up potential office-comedy clichés, then failing to drop the other shoe, though seemingly more out of navel-gazing apathy than subversive self-awareness. As a result, it's reasonably unpredictable, and surprisingly disarming, in spite of its copious self-indulgences. Haiku Tunnel was originally a stage monologue about Kornbluth's office days, which explains its narrow focus—the movie's other characters are little more than props and scenery—and its frequent lapses into soliloquy. Kornbluth earnestly addresses the camera, turning situational comedy into observational comedy, when he isn't just veering off into absurdism. Sometimes, he falls into a stand-up routine; at other points, he's his own narrator or apologist. On his own, he's not quite enough to sustain this ramshackle film through its full length, but he does give it a quirky, pleasant character that's far more appealing than Lovitz's nasal whine.