Better Luck Tomorrow

 

I absolutely love when a movie can change my perspective on certain genres, and Better Luck Tomorrow accomplished this. I do not like films that center high schoolers. I think they usually have surface level plots and unremarkable characters. This film changed my perspective on movies that focus on high schoolers. I forgot at certain moments that the characters were even in high school, but that might be because the actors were in their thirties. 

The incredible part of this film is that the director plays with the Asian-American identity, flipping the role of model minority on its head. Although these characters may show the model minority stereotype to their parents and teachers, but the audience gets the closest look as to what these characters are really like, without their model minority mask.  The director is taking this idea of 'Asian and Nerdy', and they deconstruct how the audience may perceive the character versus how the characters actually act throughout the film. They are perfect students to the adults in their world, and the audience quickly realizes that the nerdy Asian character was actually a front for what these students were secretly up to.