Review of Better Luck Tomorrow (2003) by Lucas K — 12 Nov 2007

There is more to this film than what meets the eye. It's a lot deeper than your average "high school misfits/gangsters" film. There's a lot of ideas thrown around in here (the vocabulary words, the goldfish symbolism), and they work surprisingly well together. It may take you more than one viewing to catch everything going on here.

First and foremost, however, what this film excels at is simply their realistic portrayal of the high school lifestyle. People can talk all they want about how this movie shatters the Asian-American stereotype, but to me, the highlight of the film was simply how realistic it all seemed. Justin Lin recreates the sometimes exciting, sometimes scary, and always awkward feeling that comes with being a young teenager in high school. I think it's something we're all able to relate to quite well.

Lin doesn't just stop here though. He obviously has a low budget, but he's able to do some pretty impressive things with this film nonetheless. He squeezes out great performances (notably, Jason Tobin as Virgil Hu). Of course, he also has a great script to go along with those performances, and cranks out some very interesting characters here, notably Virgil and Derek.

Also, he has some great, interesting camera shots going on throughout (the revolving camera in one of the ending scenes). He uses some good editing work to flesh out some good ideas, notably the interplay of two different scenes at once (Ben's memory of the New Year's party and another, more traumatic scene near the end of the movie).

This is clearly an very, very inspired film from Justin Lin. He's got a lot of ideas in this one, and he's able to portray it all as a cohesive, engaging story. It makes you wonder what would have happened if MTV decided to aggressively market this one, instead of the fluff they usually decide to market heavily. This one would have been deserving of the exposure.