Better Luck Tomorrow
By Miyun Kim, Staff Writer

Better Luck Tomorrow (also known as simply BLT) is a film you have to see. You have to see it not because it’s a great movie (although two thirds of it is) but because it’s an important one for Asian filmmakers, writers, actors, and anyone who wants to see more Asians making and acting in Hollywood movies. If you want to see your Juilliard and Yale Drama-trained actor friend in a movie doing something besides servicing white GI’s dressed in a red cheongsam, you need to buy a dozen tickets and tell everyone you know it’s the best movie you’ve ever seen. It opens in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco on April 11th, and if it does well, it will open in many more cities the following two weeks. If the box office for BLT hits big, then Hollywood will be hunting for the next Justin Lin.

Better Luck Tomorrow was co-written, directed and edited by Taiwan-born, Southern California-raised Justin Lin. He financed the movie himself with ten credit cards, racking up six-figure debt to get the picture made. The cast (although there is a cameo by Jerry "The Beaver" Mathers) is entirely Asian. While some of the actors are recognizable, there isn’t a big star among them. Somehow, despite the odds, the film was accepted at Sundance in 2002 and was even nominated for the Dramatic Competition. Massive buzz ensued, and studios competed fiercely for the distribution rights. MTV Films was the winner, and picked up BLT as its very first film acquisition ever. Lin has since become an official Hollywood hot property, with a big studio picture based on the book The Tenth Justice by sub-Grisham (himself the sub-Turow) legal thriller writer Brad Meltzer as his next project.

The film itself is a teen drama about overachieving high school students with identity crises in wealthy suburban California. Hardly a stereotype-busting premise, to be sure, but Lin takes the stereotype of the Asian math geek and turns it around in a hilarious way. Ben Manibag, played by Parry Shen, is the lead, an eager-to-please nice guy. His best friend Virgil is played with maniacal glee by Jason Tobin. Virgil’s cousin Han (Sung Kang) completes the trio as the group brute. Sung Kang has little dialogue and looks at least a decade past high school, but is still the movie’s most charismatic performer with the kind of mysterious charm of Benicio del Toro.

At first glance, Ben and his friends are living the lives of the model Asian students - good grades, volunteering, doing anything to build up the Ivy League resumes. It turns out, though, that they are using that façade to scam their way to a few extra bucks. In a scene sure to have aspiring suburban criminals taking notes, Ben and company rip off a local computer store with Ben using his clueless look of innocence to pull it off.

Soon, the boys are lured further wayward by Daric (Roger Fan) who runs a cheat sheet ring in the school. Daric is a senior, the big man on campus that Ben someday hopes to become. Daric too is using his good student status to get away with the cheating. "We don’t have to play by the rules," he tells Ben.

Ben has a requisite love interest, of course, a cheerleader named Stephanie Vandergosh. Here too, Lin seems to be poking fun at some age-old conventions because Ms. Vangergosh is not blonde, not perky, and is played by the Chinese actress Karin Anna Cheung. Stephanie’s parents are white but we never see them on screen. In fact, all the parents are conspicuously absent. They aren’t even mentioned. While this is obviously intentional it feels like a misstep. A woman at the screening kept saying out loud, "Where are the parents for chrissake?" Lin has said that the burden of parental expectations was supposed to shroud these characters so that the actual parents weren’t needed; but instead, it seemed like the characters were trust-funded orphans.

The first hour of BLT is a fast, funny ride. Ben, Daric, Han, and Virgil become notorious after rumors start flying about their new extracurricular activities. They love the respect they gain as the "Chinese mafia". In a scene where they meet up with real gang members, we see how false that image is. As a high school drama, BLT works brilliantly with characters that are conflicted and flawed and just happen to be Asian. The acting is uniformly good and the flashy rapid-fire editing will help keep the attention of even the most ADD-afflicted.

Roger Ebert has been a public supporter of BLT. At Sundance, he famously defended Lin’s film when another critic blasted it for showcasing "amoral" Asian characters. Ebert argued that no critic would say that a white character couldn’t be flawed and amoral. I agree with Ebert wholeheartedly and have no problem with showing the violence and ugliness in people as long as it makes sense. In BLT, the violence just shows up, turning the last third of the movie into a Tarantino-esque gore fest without a minute of modulation. The not-as-nice-as-they-seem high school boys are suddenly not only sly criminals but psychopaths too. Character development goes out the window to cater to some bone-headed, clichéd plot points. It’s as if Lin decided that it wasn’t enough to make a really good teen movie, he wanted to make Reservoir Dogs, only he already had the high school movie so he had to tack it on.

See Better Luck Tomorrow for its polished, mainstream style, having no tea, mah-jongg or accents. See it to support Asian filmmaking in this country. Talk about it and see it again.

By the way, I’m available as the next Justin Lin.