As I Am

“"Emmanuel" (Andre Myers) - who takes a shower whilst still wearing his glasses (?) - can't decide what milk to buy for baking. Luckily for him, hunky supermarket assistant manager "Demetrius" (Jerimiyah Dunbar) is on hand. Later on, and luckily again, this same man is there to stop him driving home whilst blotto! Next morning he wakes up in strange surroundings, quickly discovering that he is in the bed of his new guardian angel (alone). Hastily, and embarrassingly, he meets the young man's two gay dads before they take a bus into town. Sobered up, "Manny" suggests they hang out for a bit and it's at this point we discover that he has some intimacy issues - which the rest of this film sets about explaining to us. The last ten minutes sort of redeem it, but for the most part this is a poorly paced affair with Myers turning in a performance that I found just too tepid before an ending that is hinted at earlier, but rushed and undercooked when it comes. Clearly made on a tiny budget, the hand held camerawork is twitchy and disorientating at times, and the dialogue struggles to put any meat on the bones of this really rather disappointing, if quite good looking, story.”

“This is about a young man dealing with a childhood trauma and also coming to terms with being gay. The story was pretty good, although it doesn't really reveal he was dealing with trauma until the end of the movie, even though it was billed that way. My only thing was that the ending felt a little weak. You go through the whole build up to the revelation, they deal with it for a few minutes and then it flashes to a future time and we don't see the full fallout from the revelation.”