The Delta

Story about handsome hunky Lincoln (Shayne Gray) who has a girlfriend and lots of great guy friends. He also likes having anonymous gay sex secretly. He meets John (Thang Chan) a Vietnamese gay guy--and things happen. Notice I didn't say interesting cause NOTHING interesting happens in this!

Slow, murky, dark and very uninteresting story about a destructive relationship. The low production values really hurt this. Also the story takes forever to get started...and ends up going nowhere! It just stops with no resolution at all. A lot of people seem to like this because Gray is so handsome. He IS handsome...but not much of an actor. I've seen worse but I've seen MUCH better. Chan was better than Gray but (understandably) seems unsure of how to play the character. Pretty dull too.

Slow, murky, unsatisfying. You can skip this one. I give it a 4...mostly for Gray's looks. Also why did Chan do a nude scene and Gray didn't?

The handsome "Lincoln" (Shayne Gray) has a decent life, plenty of money and a girlfriend "Monica" (Rachel Zan Huss) but he also has a secret. When she declines to put out one evening, he heads to a cruising area of Memphis where he initially encounters a daddy figure before meeting "Minh". He's a Vietnamese man who is almost the antithesis of "Lincoln". His mother quite recently arrived in the USA, his father was an American soldier - they split up and he's now living with some fellow Vietnamese. They two men chat but "Minh" isn't so keen to go straight for the sex; he wants to get to know his new friend a little. To that end, they take his father's boat and a different kind of cruise on the delta; have a beer and set off some fireworks. It's that latter activity that annoys the police and sends "Minh" feeing into the forest. Has he something to hide? Well the tail end of the film enlightens us a little to the true nature of this man. I did like the concept here, but I'm afraid the acting is pretty nondescript and for a film that relies heavily on conversation, the audio mix makes much of the dialogue inaudible and that proves quite irritating after a while. I think it might have made for a better short feature. Condensing it's more potent aspects into an hour or so might have given it more punch, but as it is - it's too slow and thinly strung out.

I was into the movie as I watched it, all the while wondering where it was going. When it ended, I thought I had skipped about 30 minutes ahead, because it just seemed unfinished.

I thought the lead actor, Shayne Gray, was excellent in the part. I thought he was so natural and acted without any bit of effort. His responses, his actions, his emotions, all were very natural. I was sorry to see that this was the only film he's been in. I would very much liked to have seen him in other films.

This film was interesting, but after seeing it through to the end, there was no point to it, I'm sorry to say. I wanted to know more about where each character was going to go, but since the film is 11 years old now, there's no way that's going to happen. Worth seeing, but just be prepared that it's going to end just as it gets interesting.

The temptation is to write about obvious good intentions. Shayne Gray is just cute and this seems be the basic virtue offered to his character .

Thang Chan performance is the basic good point of film, presenting, sure, with a good fist of ciches, the reaistic image of allianation.

The probem, maybe the first part, we intentioned , ooking for suggest the struggle of Lincoln with his sexuality but, unfortunately, too ong and pretty boring.

In short, just a familiar indie recipe, not different by another, proposing faces of loneliness and reminding social traumas in fair manner.

The end is so predictable than just works as nice confirmation of what you suppose.

So, a nice film . Sure, for a precise target.

"THE DELTA is wanting in focus, maundering in a scattershot fashion that becomes a norm in 1990s indie sphere and later the "mumblecore" in the noughties (often in default of a scintillating script and/or munificent funds). For instance, the passages depicting Lincoln's social life with his entitled friends feel wretchedly slack, totally disengaged from the film's theme. It is also not helping by the fact that Gray is a pretty but empty vase, a polite smile of condescension is his only expression regardless of what happens. However, Sachs shows more promise in his attempt to probe John's intersectionality (black, Asian, gay and immigrant constitute a gold mine, which is a rare sight). John's dialogue hews closely to the subculture vernacular and Chan pours out enough raw emotion into John's dysphoria-turned-cynicism-and-resentment, which poignantly projects a sharp political angle to elevate the film slightly above its ilks."

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