Mighty Acorns: One of Justin Lin's First Films

Okay... if I'm permitted a bit of honesty here.  I must be bored or something.  Oh, and this is part of my soon-to-be popular segment: IT CAME FROM THE LIBRARY.  And I mean the State's library, not my own personal one.  So I checked this one out from the library, hoping to find a good image.  As you may know, I'm always on the lookout for a great, cinematic image.  And I have this software which came from Best Buy (C)(R)(TM), of all places, which makes it just about a snap to, um... "rip" a movie from a DVD and turn it into an .mp4 file, which are very popular these days.  HOWEVER, and this is a big however, it doesn't work on all discs.  Maybe one or two percent of discs can't be read by this software.  And Justin Lin's first feature-length directorial effort called Better Luck Tomorrow is in that one to two percent, so I decided to just watch the damn thing.  It's a story that seems awful familiar: if the gang from Ferris Bueller were more into crime, let's just leave it at that.  But it does a fine job of capturing the trials and tribulations of high school, I'll give it that.  I must be jealous because I actually wasn't good enough to make the cut for Academic Decathlon, and sometimes I regret not taking physics, but I was burnt out, man!  Trying to hustle 'A's on seven subjects at once... it can burn a person out, as you might know.

But the film is rich with nuance, and decent enough performances.  We see a few months in the life of an honor student named Ben Manibag, played by the kinda bland Parry Shen.  I mean... really?  You couldn't do better than "General Hospital"?  There's a subplot that smacks a little too much of Some Kind of Wonderful involving the girlfriend of Harold.  He's pretty much the only future star in this thing, if you measure movies by their "Where Were They When" quotient.  The all-time champ in that regard just might be Coppola's other 1983 effort, The Outsiders.  I did also like the performance of Daric, and clearly the director did, too, as he was in one of the Fast and Furious sequels.  Which reminds me... here's yet another case of a subliminal directorial wish list, if you can call it that.  Just like how Christopher Nolan rather prominently put a Batman (TM)(C)(R) logo in one of his early efforts called Following, one of the characters in our instant case talks about their lives as how they were living "fast and furious."  Add it to all your films, kids!

And of course, what film would be complete without a total jarhead character like Virgil.  Why, it hardly seems fair to call him Bizarro Manibag somehow.  He's everything that Ben is not: almost a total f... screw-up.  And he plays an even more prominent role in the Fast and Furious saga that Mr. Lin is all but in-complete-control-of these days!  Again, for the most part, the film gets the small details right.  It even has a variation on Diane Court's word gimmick in Say Anything... Also, this has a rather subdued soundtrack for an MTV production!  One of the details I hate to admit I'm fascinated with: Ben's Academic Decathlon team gets to compete in the nationals in Vegas.  It turns practically into his post-bar mitzvah as the other guys hire a hooker.  Ben gets to go first, and she tells him "No kissing."  Kissing is more intimate than sex!  Who knew?

BUT THEN... the film bites off just a little bit more than it can chew.  I'll try not to spoil too much for you: the subplot involving John Cho's character, Steve Choe... boy!  He was lucky to get that part!  Anyway, Ben's gang of academically-inclined thieves gets an offer from Steve to pull a heist.  A crime does come of it... just not the one you might think.  They did try to warn us  in the beginning that something bad was coming, but ultimately I'm too much of a film snob, and I expect a little  more psychological honesty from my crime films.  I mean, it's like that Netflix (TM)(C)(R) film, The Pale Blue Eye.  It's got great production values and all that, but... how can you have a film where Edgar Allan Poe is almost sacrificed in a Satanic ritual?  I guess it explains the themes he explored as an author... in a way.  Who wouldn't be affected by that?

**1/2

-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan