LOL (2006): B

Charting the deleterious effect of technology on human relations, Joe Swanberg’s LOL follows three twentysomething males whose obsession with being online or on a cell phone proves problematic for their romantic prospects. That devices designed to foster greater (and easier) communication have, in many respects, had the opposite effect is not a particularly novel notion, and one that Swanberg’s indie repeats ad nauseam through a narrative (used here in the loosest sense of the term) in which his emotionally detached protagonists Tim (Swanberg), Chris (C. Mason Wells) and Alex (Kevin Bewersdorf) botch chances at love by fixating on their gadgets. The repetitiveness of the writer/director’s story – in which each segment reinforces the same idea – eventually becomes wearisome, yet he captures relatable 21st-century truths in small, excruciating moments, such as an opening montage of blank male faces staring at internet porn and Alex’s pathetic scramble to find a computer power cable while a ready-and-waiting girl (who’s already driven him to St. Louis and let him stay at her parents house) sits disappointedly in an adjacent room. More affecting still, though, is LOL’s Alex-produced audio-video segments in which random vocal sounds made by a variety of people are edited into abstract mini-musical numbers that express how technological dependence leads to fractured communication breakdown.

Comments

[Liz]

Sounds interesting, but the curse of technology is that it's fleeting - by the time you can get a film written and cast and released, it's not quite so relevant anymore. Films built on the premise of "texting" or "computers" or "internet dating" are already passé.