Better Luck Tomorrow
| Better Luck Tomorrow | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Justin Lin |
| Produced by | Justin Lin Julie Asato Ernesto Foronda |
| Written by | Ernesto Foronda Justin Lin Fabian Marquez |
| Starring |
Parry Shen Jason Tobin Sung Kang Roger Fan John Cho Karin Anna Cheung |
| Music by | Michael Gonzales Tobin Mori |
| Cinematography | Patrice Lucien Cochet |
| Edited by | Justin Lin |
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Production
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| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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101 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $250,000 |
| Box office | $3.8 million |
Better Luck Tomorrow is a 2002 crime-drama film directed by Justin Lin. The movie is about Asian American overachievers who become bored with their lives and enter a world of petty crime and material excess. Better Luck Tomorrow introduced film audiences to a cast including Parry Shen, Jason Tobin, Sung Kang, Roger Fan, and John Cho.
The film was based loosely on the murder of Stuart Tay, a teenager from Orange County, California, by four Sunny Hills High School honor students on December 31, 1992.
In its first ever film acquisition, MTV Films eventually acquired Better Luck Tomorrow after it debuted at The Sundance Film Festival. After meeting at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, Nevada in April 2001, MC Hammer (credited as a producer) provided the much needed funding to the filmmaker Justin Lin for this film. The director said, "Out of desperation, I called up MC Hammer because he had read the script and liked it. Two hours later, he wired the money we needed into a bank account and saved us."
Ben Manibag (Parry Shen) and his friend Virgil Hu (Jason Tobin) are lying in the sun discussing college-admissions, but hearing a cell-phone ringing, begin digging in the dirt and soon uncover a human hand.
Ben and Virgil are the stereotypical highly-intelligent overachieving Asian-Americans whose only goal is to gain acceptance into highly prestigious Ivy League universities. In fact, Ben learns a new SAT vocabulary-word every night through rote-memorization and recitation. These words act as the dividers between different chapters of Ben's life. In reality, Ben reveals that he in fact uses his perfectionism in order to act out in other ways, such as toilet-papering houses with Virgil and other petty-crimes. Part of these activities include the purchase and return of computer-equipment with Virgil, and Virgil's cousin Han Hu (Sung Kang) to earn easy money.
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