Everyone knows a person like Ben - the perfect Asian American high school teen - extremely intelligent, a perfectionist, overachiever whose tunnel vision leads to nothing less than graduating at the top of the class and acceptance to the best Ivy League university. Ben lives in an upper middle class, conservative suburb of Orange County, California. As Ben struggles to achieve social success in high school, we discover his darker side. Along with two friends, Virgil, a brilliant yet awkward, overeager and socially inept misfit, and Virgil's cousin Han, a lost soul with more brawn than brains, Ben leads a double life of mischief and petty crimes that alleviate the pressures of perfection.
At the start of his high school freshman year, Ben befriends Daric, the senior valedictorian ? another archetypical overachiever and perfectionist. But Daric is somewhat odd. While being the most intelligent student in the class, he also seems to be the most volatile and dangerous. Behind his trusting and benevolent façade lies a lurking secret, a timebomb ready to explode.
A group of seemingly "perfect" high school buddies lead double lives, flying high in a world of petty crime and material excess. A free wheeling lifestyle that soon takes a downward spiral, leading to an unexpected, violent end.
(15 votes)
3.
Justin Lin's well-received 2002 independent feature, Better Luck Tomorrow, is a strangely appealing story of the mysterious, somehow inexorable drift of an ultra-conscientious, Southern California high school senior, Ben (Parry Shen), toward a fateful interlude with crime. Though highly focused on impressing colleges with his thoughtful balance of excellent grades, energized volunteer work (as a translator), and varsity sports (warming the bench during basketball games), something about Ben appears to be unraveling. Perhaps it is an attraction to his out-of-reach lab partner (Karin Anna Cheung), or his growing attachment to hard cash, or simply the malaise that coats his every act of self-denial. In any case, he and a brood of fellow Asian American overachievers metamorphose into the local go-to gang of black-market thievery--all while keeping up their classes. Lin brings a fresh angle to the exhausted youth-crime genre, and clarifies, with no small wisdom, the distinction between building a future and living one's destiny. --Tom Keogh
(14 votes)
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