Better Luck Tomorrow
Just because your movie gets picked up MTV, who bragged about its first independent film acquisition, doesn’t mean you have to throw in distracting MTVish style into your story because you don’t believe you have original material. It was a shame about this, because I liked a few of the scenes in Better Luck Tomorrow here and there, especially one where the Asian kids at the high school have to confront and accept how they are seen by the rest of the student body. The main character makes the basketball team, we understand it to be because he works hard and has a modicum of talent, but it is suggested by a school reporter, an Asian reporter trying to get him to accept that he was only put on the team because of affirmative action, rather than his own effort. There isn’t the mean spirited antagonism coming from the reporter’s end, he seems to be suggesting that this is so obviously a fact that it seems silly to think otherwise. The rest of the movie takes scenes from Bully and mixes it with style stolen from Lock, Stock, and 2 Smoking Barrels (as if that was original), and throws away the potentially interesting perspective in favor of look-at-me editing.
