Better Luck Tomorrow

April 14, 2003

Better Luck Tomorrow turned out to be a lot better than I thought it was going to be. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s a good movie about Asian American kids growing up in Orange County, being perfect students on the fast track to good colleges who have some extracurricular activities that they don’t put on their applications. Namely, stealing, buying and selling whatever cash-friendly goods they can get their hands on.

While it is a film about Asians, it does a good job of addressing its points without feeling preachy and didactic, and the characters are drawn universally enough that it’s not a film that you can really pigeonhole as an Asian American experience. Everyone turns in really good acting performances and director Justin Lin does a magnificent job of delivering a professional looking film for a really teeny budget. The main problem the film has is that sometimes it feels more like vignettes strung together than a strong storyline. The movie happens over the course of four months, so sometimes there are gaps where you feel like the story kind of jumped. Minor quibbling though.

One of the crew is named Han, and I must say, the resemblance is uncanny:

Posted in Moving Pictures