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I finally got to see LOL last night (playing all week at the Pioneer Theater in New York). My personal fondness leans more toward Joe Swanberg's first film, Kissing on the Mouth, but they're two totally different films. However, both continue to explore what I consider to be the most exciting territory in filmmaking today.

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. Three different boy/girl couplings are explored. The males spend more and more time connecting through techie devices like cell phones and IM, while the women grow disenchanted with them. The ending of the film plays like a final flourish of a jazz improvisation. It's not a climax, 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. It's no coincidence today's young and courageous filmmakers are playing in this territory.

The digital revolution of affordable cameras, editing systems and other filmmaking equipment is shaping up to be a revolution of process. 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—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.

Last night I saw a sneak preview of Snakes on a Plane. I drove to the theater feeling like I was being pulled by an invisible tractor beam. Why? I've been asking myself since last night. Is it how this film has tapped into some dormant creative energy of the MySpace generation? Do I have a hidden fear of snakes and planes itching to surface? Maybe my upbringing in a white bread suburb left me with a fantasy of being a wily black man slapping back snakes like it's my business. It could have been the thousands of rubber snakes sent to theaters playing the movie, but I don't think so.

The first ten minutes showed me why I came. The opening plods through an attempt to piece together a plot and explain how snakes get on the plane. Everyone I was with agreed thirty seconds into the first scene we should be on the plane by now and there should be snakes. We were longing for what we came for. We didn't come for "The movie event of the summer," or something "horrifying," "bone-chilling," "the next generation in terror," or "a non-stop thrill ride from start to finish." The film never claimed to be any of those things. It's snakes on a plane. No more and no less. We wanted it straight and, after some silly patching together of a plot, we got it like a drink from the fire hose.

We hissed when some unsuspecting passenger was about to get throttled by a snake. We cheered if that passenger got attacked in some particularly gruesome way—any possible desire to see snakes bite somebody on the (fill in the blank) is satisfied. We cheered every time Samuel L. Jackson killed a snake. We cheered just to cheer when the movie got a little too serious. By the end of the night, I understood why I couldn't miss this movie for the world. Yelling at snakes with a bunch of people in a dark room is fun. That's what Snakes on a Plane promises and that's what it delivers. I hope Hollywood learns a lesson and starts marketing movies based on what they are, not what they aren't.

Shakespeare Behind Bars (dir. Hank Rogerson) cracks open the hardened shell of an audience and makes us look at the true human soul inside characters who are otherwise dismissible as "monsters." There is nobody I wouldn't recommend it to. So I have to limit the focus here to what was most important to me about the film and why I walked out  knowing that my life is better for watching it.

Curt Tofteland has been volunteering on a weekly basis with prisoners in Kentucky for ten years now to direct the Shakespeare Behind Bars program: 30 inmates who rehearse nine months to perform one show.  Through a friend I was given the opportunity to have breakfast with Curt Tofteland and Hank Rogerson, director of the documentary.  As I tried to hang words on what the documentary meant to me, Curt just nodded with a knowing smile.  He told me that Shakespeare isn't just a literary icon, but the writer who captured raw humanity better than anyone ever has.  Which is why he brought Shakespeare to the prisoners.

24 hours a day, 7 days a week, year after year these inmates wear a hardened mask, a false-self who feels no pain.  It's survival of the fittest and softness is not rewarded in prison.  But for the 30 inmates involved with the Shakespeare productions, honesty is a mandate.  They are cast by their peers in roles that fit their background and their crime.  In their rehearsals they push each other to go deep, to find honesty, to not act but really wear their character, which for a lot of them means wearing their own skin for the first time.  From the screen, their souls became palpable during rehearsals. I watched them discover for the first time the true man behind the label "prisoner," "deviant," "convict."

The film is breathtaking. I laughed and I cried. Then I left the theater chewing on the fact I just just laughed and cried through the struggles of men society has deemed unsafe to enjoy the freedoms I enjoy. That's a sure sign of great filmmaking.