Flick subverts, embraces stereotypes

"Better Luck Tomorrow" is a curious and occasionally disturbing little gem. Following its 2002 Sundance Film Festival premiere, Roger Ebert rightfully defended the film when a fellow critic (also white) labeled it an "immoral" representation of Asian Americans. While the movie, which boasts an Asian American director and cast, doesn't present the group in the greatest of lights, it's certainly not immoral.\nDirector Justin Lin's breakthrough is a hodge-podge of Larry Clark's seedily pseudo-pornographic flicks i.e. "Kids" and "Bully," an after school special and Scorsese's "Goodfellas," only transplanted to Orange County, Calif., and featuring a small sect of stereotypically overachieving Asian American teenagers as its heroes and heavies.\n"BLT" focuses on Ben (Parry Shen, underplaying things nicely), a seemingly together honor student who busies himself with an excess of extracurricular activities: academic decathlon, JV basketball, maintaining his perfect GPA, perfecting his SAT score, volunteering as a Spanish translator at a nearby hospital, working at a mall-based hot dog stand and… the occasional bout of grand larceny.\nWhen the mundane nature of Ben's suburban lifestyle wears thin, he unites with Virgil (Jason J. Tobin, who's essentially an Asian Corey Haim, but with greater range), his goofy best friend, Han (Sung Kang, so cool, he's like the bastard lovechild of James Dean and Chow Yun-Fat), Virgil's tight-lipped tough of a cousin and Daric (Roger Fan), the only kid in school with more academic and extracurricular clout than himself, to form a "Chinese Mafia" of sorts. Together, the group schemes, smokes, snorts, screws and stomps its way through the rest of the flick.\nWhile stylish (slow-mos, speed-ups and 360-degree camera moves are the norm) and often equal parts sexy, scary and funny, "BLT" is a pissed-off film with an awful lot to say. Lin, who not only directed, but also co-wrote, produced, edited and co-stars, embraces stereotypes and later subverts them in his deconstruction of the "model minority." Despite the occasional snag (a boom mic is clearly seen in one of the film's pivotal sequences), "Better Luck Tomorrow" is an incendiary cinematic achievement that will spur thought and conversation, which also announces Lin as a singular voice to be reckoned with.