Miramax Films presents the wickedly offbeat love story, Eagle vs Shark, a funny, fractured romance between two total misfits woven into an all-consuming quest for revenge and shot through with the strange, sweet hilarity of the human condition. When Lily (Horsley), a lonely, oddball fast-food waitress and hopeless romantic, and Jarrod (Clement), another lonely oddball and video game clerk who has spent the last decade plotting revenge against a bully from high school, connect at a dress as your favorite animal party, it s a match seemingly made in outcast Heaven. But when Lily decides to risk everything for love, her hopes are nearly dashed as, after a brief fling, Jarrod dumps her because he s too busy training for his all-important payback mission. But neither of them can anticipate the grit the steadfastly optimistic Lily will show in her heartbreak. As Jarrod's day of reckoning arrives and everything hits the fan, Jarrod and Lily will find something that goes beyond romantic fantasies and revenge faith in who they are.

Since the 1980s, the nerd has triumphed in comedies from Weird Science to Napoleon Dynamite, but what about the female of the species? In Eagle vs. Shark, New Zealand's Taika Waititi presents his offbeat romance from the perspective of the likeably quirky Lily (co-writer Loren Horsley). The Meaty Boy cashier fantasizes about the sensitive yet boorish Jarrod (Jemaine Clement from HBO's Flight of the Conchords). Sporting the worst on-screen hairdo since Javier Bardem's pageboy in No Country for Old Men, the video-game wiz visits Lily's fast-food emporium daily, oblivious to the slouchy brunette with the shy smile. Except for her cartoonist brother, Damon (Joel Tobeck), nobody else notices Lily either. When she crashes Jarrod's costume party--dressed as a shark to his eagle--her fortunes begin to change, but there's a catch: Much like Adam Sandler's tightly-wound salesman in P.T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, Jarrod has a dark side. Not only is he a habitual liar, but he intends to kill his high school nemesis, Eric (David Fane). At first, Lily supports Jarrod's homicidal plan, but their relationship hits a snag when they travel to his hometown for the big face-off (Waititi plays Jarrod’s brother in flashbacks). Suffice to say, no murders take place during the course of Eagle vs. Shark. Stop-motion sequences (revolving around irregular apples), the Phoenix Foundation's electro-pop score, deleted scenes, outtakes, and audio commentary all contribute to the weird charm of Waititi's first feature. --Kathleen C. Fennessy