I finally got to see LOL last night (playing all week at the Pioneer Theater in New York). My personal preference still leans more toward Joe Swanberg's first film, Kissing on the Mouth, but they're two totally different films. Swanberg has a delicate touch with the "awkward moments" he constructs, and LOL is full of them (he talks about this in an indieWIRE interview). Whatever your preference, though, both films continue to explore what I consider to be the most exciting territory in filmmaking today.

While Kissing on the Mouth is like watching young twenty-somethings play a chess game between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy, LOL is more like riffs on how intimacy interfaces with technology. The film explores three different hetero couples. In each case, the man spends more and more time connecting through techie devices like cell phones and IM, while the woman grows disenchanted with her partner and his reliance on these interfaces. The last moments of the film play like a final flourish of a jazz improvisation. It's not a climax, exactly, but the players are done and ready to move on.

Although it may feel haphazard at times, the film never presents itself as being anything more than meditations on a theme. It takes place in a foggy spot between essay, documentary, and drama--a territory many of today's young and courageous filmmakers are playing in. The digital revolution of affordable cameras, editing systems and other filmmaking equipment is shaping up to be a revolution of process and storytelling methods. Affordable equipment is taking filmmakers into the more intimate spaces of their lives. If reality TV is about manipulating spaces and relationships for television ratings, then films like LOL and 51 Birch Street are about showing our spaces and relationships as they are: unglamorous, mundane, a lot of blank walls and futons, and yet--above all--totally captivating. These films certainly haven't tipped the attention of mainstream audiences, but I think they're the most exciting thing cameras are rolling on today.