Sometimes you’ll watch a movie and it won’t be very impactful. Scenes of it might surface at times throughout the rest of the day, but overall it doesn’t leave you floating around in an existential crisis. And then there are those movies that do. That suck you into a reality so deeply, it takes days to crawl back out of them. Where the movie is like a black hole, sucking you into an alternative universe, and the end of it feels like being violently spit back into your own reality, questioning if it’s even real. Better Luck Tomorrow had this affect on me.
Here are the topics it brought up for me:
- It was strange to see such a large Asian cast
- The representation that they would inevitably portray for APIA people because of the lack of APIA films in general, how some people might use a film like this to further justify demonization of APIA people
- The comparison of getting straight A’s as a type of alibi, an acknowledgement of the model minority presence
- How the movie mirrored common coming of age movies in theme and archetypes, except with APIA faces
- APIA beauty standards
- How offensive a lot of the script was, how I’m used to current pop culture being more “woke”
- The intersection of APIA culture and black culture
- The idea that “If you repeat something enough times it becomes part of you”
- The obvious use of extreme violence and death, and how that was traumatizing but also powerful, and the whirlwind it left my brain in
- What drove him to murder?
- Does the murder have to do with being APIA, and was the director trying to comment on that?
- Did he turn himself in?
- How do you live life after that?
- Imagining being in his shoes
- Feeling as if the murder was almost normalized, “just another thing that happened that year”