This is your typical indie coming-of-age tale about a teenager, though it’s clearly working with a very tiny budget. Set within a migrant family living in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, the movie digs into how fragile old-school traditions and expectations can be. We follow a teenage son as he goes through the process of coming out and struggles to find acceptance while dealing with homophobia, domestic abuse, and a messy love triangle that involves his own sister. Goyo is seventeen and just about to graduate from high school. Since he’s been a bit more feminine since he was a little kid, he’s always had to deal with emotional and physical transition from his dad, Ramon, who is obsessed with him being "a man." The only real love he gets is from a lady next door who actually respects him for who he is. The family lives in a Mexican community where everyone works on a grape farm, but things get shaken up when a new guy named Lucio arrives. Lucio basically seduces Goyo ...
I have said this a few times that movies like this would have been acceptable back in 80s or 90s, but stuff like this coming out in 2007 is a bit unacceptable. It had a terrible story, if you can even call it that, and the way that it was written and produced just made the movie look and come off very badly. Not even half decent actors can save a shoddy plot and. abad direction.
Horror novelist Stephen Grimes has to finish his novel 'The Shadows' in 2 weeks. The problem is he is blocked just after first paragraph. One night on a late night drive, he hits a young man Emett, who happens to have the same last name and rushes him to the hospital. A tentative friendship between the two men erupts into a heated affair. Eventually, Stephen decides to give up his demanding "real life" with Emett and his friends helping. Soon thereafter, Stephen finds out that he has been the patsy in an elaborate con, and looks for the answers in the shadows of his former life. From now on, we don't know where the plot of the film is and what is the plot of the novel he's writing. The film is dynamic, with constant turns-over between the reality of the film and that of the novel.
The plot is wafer thin as mentioned above and the storyline was really hard to follow. The film started dipping down after first 30 minutes. Why does the writer want to give up his identity? why would he transfer all his money to random people?? were those people real or characters of his novel? Is the writer a he or she? Is the love affair between writer and guy or is it love with his own shadow? None of these questions are really answered and it makes viewing very frustrating. The end almost made no sense to me. I will recommend avoiding this film. (2/10)

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