Initially, first-time writer-director David Maquiling's Too Much Sleep seems like a pitifully generic assortment of Amerindie clichés, yet another slight coming-of-age tale set amidst the neatly manicured lawns of suburbia. It's little wonder the long-undistributed film, made in 1997, needed rescue from oblivion by the Shooting Gallery series. But Maquiling's deliberately nondescript, middle-class landscape—littered with half-empty strip malls, modest ranch homes, and square patches of property—gives an appearance of normalcy as he gently tweaks it toward the edge of absurdity. An assured and ingratiating shaggy-dog comedy about a young slacker's wayward lurch into manhood, Too Much Sleep reworks the basic premise of Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog into something closer to the low-key amble of Richard Linklater. Looking like a walking blank slate, the bland-faced Marc Palmieri stars as an unmotivated 24-year-old who still lives at home with his doting mother and naps through his graveyard shift as a security guard. One morning on the bus, he unwittingly falls for a scam perpetrated by a pretty young woman (Nicol Zanzarella) and her older partner (Judy Sabo Podinker), who run off with a paper sack carrying the unlicensed gun he inherited from his father. Unable to go to the police, he solicits the help of Pasquale Gaeta, a retired local official with vague and probably exaggerated ties to the criminal underworld. Gaeta's hilariously irrepressible tall tales set the tone for their loosely organized investigation, which introduces Palmieri to one odd character after another. Too Much Sleep follows its hero as he awakens from lethargy and learns to take stock in his life, but Maquiling is far more interested in the journey than the destination, trusting that the moral of the story will quietly take root without being hammered home. Maquiling's delightfully off-kilter vignettes and sharply drawn eccentrics (particularly the scene-stealing Gaeta) show a real gift for the rhythms of sketch comedy. Maquiling may not be an especially original talent, but the resuscitation of Too Much Sleep proves him worthy of discovery.