I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Some of my favorite reviews are ones that advise something like "stick with it to the end." I like movies that require an investment, that challenge me to do something I wouldn't normally do. So that's what I did with this movie.It started out bad, as some reviews warned it would, so I stuck with it. And stuck with it. And stuck with it - all the way to the end. And it did change, suddenly, after about an hour (a longer wait than I had expected), only it got worse instead of better. What other reviewers liked so much I did not like at all.SPOILERS AHEAD!I do not like totally unbelievable, fairy-tale developments - like princesses falling in love with frogs and living happily together ever after. That kind of thing does not make me all giddy inside and weepy outside. It makes me angry, because never in any possible universe (except Hollywood) does that EVER happen.That it appeals so strongly to gay audiences is pretty disturbing, because it means an awful lot of gay men still despise themselves and rush headlong into any impossible fantasy that slithers their way. It's a drug, an addiction to something unnatural and unreal because real life is just too horrible.That's what this movie is: a sick fantasy. It's even constructed that way, with VERY frequent flashbacks and fantasy sequences and whiny or cutesy asides to the audience by the protagonist.The first hour is almost unbearably tiresome, with its aggressive homophobia, presenting gays as lonely, desperate, driven, bitchy, self-loathing creeps; shifting into fairy-tale nonsense for the last half-hour is NOT the cure for such relentless self-hatred.This whole movie is about as phony and disgusting as a movie can be. Shame on James Vasquez for writing such sick crap and on Carrie Preston for turning it into a movie!

I'm writing this review for people who want to see queer films and who check reviews to see if a film is worth their time. 29th and Gay feels at best like an unfunny version of the occasionally funny TV show How I Met Your Mother. The main character James, like the Ted character on Mother, talks directly to the viewer and spends the whole film whining about his life. There's a male friend whose life is a string of one night stands and a female friend who can't find a guy. But mostly 29th and Gay feels like an amateur movie made for cable access. It's meandering and plot less and takes itself way too seriously.The acting is fine, and 28th and Gay shows LA in a realistic non- glamorous way. But everything else about the film is lousy. The characters are really annoying, the film starts off as an attempt at comedy then turns more serious, there's a reoccurring dream sequence that is goofy (and when meaning is applied to the dream it's just stupid), and in the end the OK looking James* takes risks and is rewarded with a cute boyfriend. Definitely not worth watching unless you need to see how not to put a movie together. *Actually I find the actor who played James to be far more attractive that the cute boyfriend. But rather than addressing any issues at all, such as how a short stocky guy with thinning hair rates in the gay scene, 29th and Gay plays another cliché card of looks over personality.

I could understand it if this film had been made in 1975, or 1985, or even 1995. To think someone would actually make this in 2005 is not to be believed. It is the story of a 29-year-old gay unemployed actor looking for love and meaning in his life. James, the actor character, can only be described as a shlub so lacking in any positive attributes that we not only have no empathy for him, we start to wish he would just shut the F up.This movie consists primary of James whining about his life. Whining and whining and whining. He has a fag hag who's nearly as shrill as he is, and the cause she's involved in was so poorly described as to be unintelligible to me. His best friend is the stereotype of a stereotype. There is nothing in the relationship between the best friends that reveals any reason for them liking each other.The dialog is meant to be witty, clearly, but nothing struck me even remotely funny, or even original for that matter. I can usually find something to admire in a gay-themed movie. But I can't think of a single thing I liked about this movie. It has absolutely NO redeeming qualities.Unless you are a gay filmmaker who needs to see what NOT to do, 29th and Gay is a complete and utter waste of time.

This is another of a new genre of "self indulgent" gay films where the writer or director also casts himself as the lead actor. He's usually not very attractive, but hey, he's in every frame of the movie, trying to be endearing instead. He's definitely clever, in a Woody Allen kind of way, but ultimately gets so annoying as the film drags on and on, you want to punch his face. One peculiarity of this genre is that the looser hero invariably gets the young dream hunk in the end, without even trying. In this film, it's a gorgeous coffee shop waiter. Through most of the film our looser just pines for him but can't summon up the guts to speak. In the end, this hunk seems to just fall in love with our blabbering looser. Why? Because it so happens that he wrote the script!