Movies

"Better Luck Tomorrow", a lukewarm attempt at film making and a poor attempt at story telling, tries too hard to be cool and not hard enough to be real. Focusing on a group of 5 affluent male SoCal AsianAm teens and one girl, this film offers only paper thin characters who apparently have no life beyond their high school and recreational activities and can't manage a range of emotion beyond disaffected indolence to some hostility. There is precious little of interest in this shallow, hollow, monotonous, naive example of why we should all be hoping for better luck with tomorrow's movie. Oh, yeah, and I do know these kids...much better than most. Another bad call by Ebert. Go see "Bully" (2001) instead. (C-)

I've been waiting for it to be released, and it was disappointing. The film has no ending, it established no clear motives for characters' behavior and the gruesome violence is completely out of sync with the rest of the movie. If the makers intended to go for Godard's existentialism or for Tarantino's explicit content they failed on both accounts. Could be slightly improved visually by re-edit, but otherwise is bland. 10 seconds of good acting don't make the 2-hour film. I was quite bored halfway into the movie. Don't waste your money, it'll be on IFC some day.

I finally saw Better Luck Tomorrow this weekend. I simply cannot the critical praise that has been lavished on this film. I don't care what it's trying to do to challenge Asian American stereotypes - this move sucks ass.The premise (straight-laced overachievers by day, gangsters by night) is interesting enough and could have made for a good film, but this isn't it. It utterly fails to explore (or even plausibly explain) why and how these kids fall into a life of suburban thuggery. The violence feels weirdly forced and is devoid of emotional impact (on either the audience or the characters). And the lead character (Ben) is absolutely unwatchable - I'm supposed to believe this vacant mama's boy is some kind of badass? There is just so much wrong with this film I don't even know what else to say about it.