Tomorrow Today

A better tomorrow: Director Lin.

Justin Lin on Better Luck Tomorrow’s stereotype subversion.

by Cindy Fuchs

Justin Lin is getting used to this interview business. With a smart new feature picked up by MTV Films, he’s been doing a lot of them. Better Luck Tomorrow follows a group of Asian-American high-school students -- including Ben (Parry Shen), Virgil (Jason J. Tobin), Han (Sung Kang) and Daric (Roger Fan) -- who give up their "model" behavior for more exciting and less predictable behavior: cheating, drugs and gang violence.

Even before MTV's muscular advertising campaign, BLT garnered attention at Sundance, when a screening attendee complained that the film offered "negative" images of Asian-American kids. Roger Ebert defended the film, loudly, and the stir made news: Lin was suddenly fielding calls from wannabe distributors. In addition to distribution, MTV gave Lin cash to tweak his $250,000 movie, made, as he says, "by credit cards." He tightened up the editing, added new scenes and "toned down" an ending that, apparently, some viewers thought "too cynical."

But it's not all about accommodating expectations. Lin grew up in Orange County and attended UCLA's School of Film and Television -- only after he "stopped growing" and realized he wouldn't make it to the NBA. He's learned a lot about the business in these few short months. He's turned down a $20-million martial arts film he found "offensive as an Asian American," in order to work with Spike Lee and Christine Vachon, among others.

Lin sees BLT intervening in the myth of the model minority, with characters who are "positive," that is, "with flaws, however big or small, fully developed." He also means to rethink the terms "Asian-American films" and "youth films," as well as the "asexual Asian-American male." This, he says, "is bothersome, and obvious, especially growing up as an Asian-American male. Working with the youth, I see that it affects them and why they want to be gangsta, to overcome that stereotype by carrying a gun. This film is not a countercomment on those stereotypes. It's three-dimensional, not opposite."

Focusing on the kids -- as they move from selling cheat sheets to selling drugs -- led Lin to experiment with a specific look and attitude. "In a way," he smiles, "I wanted to make an ŒMTV film,' but I didn't want it to be empty in the way that that suggests. I didn't want it to be cool just because it's jump-cutting or we're changing speeds. I wanted to have reason behind those decisions."

The marketing campaign has focused both on BLT's Asian-American characters (as a new "trend" in representation) and its "universal" story. But, Lin says, "this story has to be Asian American, upper middle class and honor roll, teen males. There are certain concerns that everyone can relate to, like I can relate to GoodFellas. If it's marketed as Œuniversal,' people are seeing the characters as human beings. I didn't want the characters to have to explain why they exist. I don't feel like I have to do that."

Better Luck Tomorrow opens Friday at area theaters. See Cindy Fuchs’ review on p. 31.