By Jeff Walsh

"The New Twenty" is a movie about a group of college friends who live in New York City. When the movie starts, we see them posing for a picture on their graduation day from college. After that we jump ahead a few years and see how they are growing up and apart.

There are two gay guys in the group of friends. One is an overweight guy who continually gets rejected on Internet sex sites. And the other is an Asian guy who starts falling in love with someone HIV positive. Most of the story revolves around the one friend who is starting a business and how that affects things.

For me, the movie just never grabbed me and made me interested in any of the characters, plots, or subplots. So, it wasn't that the movie was bad, inasmuch as it was just… there.

By Jeff Walsh

"Finding Me" is an interesting movie to watch, because most of the time I watched it, my verbtaim thoughts were soon repeated back to me. The main character of the movie, Faybien, starts off as an aimless guy who has no academic interests or a good job. But, we see him phone a friend when he sees Lonnie, a hot guy that often appears at his bus stop. In the call, he is excited to see the guy there again and decides he needs to finally say hi.

It's only after that point that the character keeps going in circles, where he keep deciding what he wants in life. But that's where it got amusing, because when the character would frustrate me and I'd think 'What is this kid's problem?', one of the characters in the movie would say 'What's your problem?' Later, I'd think, he needs to do something already and stop thinking everything through so much. Then a character would say 'You need to just go for it.'

So, on one hand, I guess I really understood how taxing it is to be Faybien's friend, but I don't think that was the point of the movie, which is really about him getting over his homophobic father, his dead mother, and other issues, and finally decide how he wants to live his life. But since you sort of know it's the only clear path, and the one he's likely to take before the credits roll, it takes him a long time getting there.

By Jeff Walsh

As it starts, "A Jihad For Love" has a familiar feeling for anyone who's ever seen movies about issues of sexuality and spirituality. We learn that the only reference to homosexuality in the Qur'an is about Sodom and Gomorrah. And that, though not part of the Qur'an, several Hadith (sayings attributed directly to Muhammad) directly condemn homosexuality. So, we're in familiar ground here, in a debate that continues about how to rectify sexuality and spirituality.

From the beginning, if you interchanged the words Qur'an and Bible, it would seem to make a lot of the same arguments with which many Americans are familiar. But as the film plays on, the familiarity washes away. People are imprisoned. Their backs bearing the marks of 100 bloody lashes. They leave their home and wait as refugees seeking asylum from a country they love, families they miss, and a religion that is still an important and meaningful part of their lives.

Muslim filmmaker Parvez Sharma isn't out to poke holes in Islam, or quote scripture back and forth with scholars (in fact, every scholar in the movie without fail just says homosexuality is wrong). But he is clearly interested in showing the depth of purpose that many gay Muslims feel, and the disconnect that causes with their culture. Sharma is also showing many sides of Islam, but none resembling the Al Qaeda caricature we usually see.