Great opening for a movie: Two Asian-American teenage boys are sunning themselves in the well appointed backyard of one of their parents. A pager goes off. One kid unhooks his from his belt. "Not mine." The sound is heard again. This time the other kid squints at his display panel. "Me neither." The pager rings a third time. A fourth.
The pair look at each other aghast, and immediately fall to their knees, then start crawling frantically across the thick lawn and tearing away at some obviously fresh-lain strips of turf. They both know exactly where to look. The camera creeps over their shoulders.
In the dirt, a disinterred hand holds the third pager. Fade to black. Title card: "Four months earlier ... "
That put the hook in my cheek, for sure. The movie in question is Justin Lin's stylish and unsettling Better Luck Tomorrow. Distributed by the venturesome MTV Productions, and styling itself the first Asian-American indie movie to break into the mainstream, BLT has just finished a successful outing in first-run cinemas here and, in revenue terms at least, has done its part in the long struggle to get Americans of Asian provenance on the screen.
Yet this isn't an uplifting saga of the immigrant experience, of hard-working new citizens making their mark in a hostile country and succeeding against the odds, and all that mindless-affirmation jive.
Model minority
Not at all. Lin and his cohorts have quite consciously taken the prevailing stereotype of Asians as "the model majority" -- with hallmarks like modesty, industry, thrift, brainiac kids, strong family values -- and beaten it unconscious with a baseball bat.
Our four heroes are high school seniors from an affluent neighbourhood. They are super-bright, all future, no filler. They take part in everything, live on the honor roll, and are exemplary students. But they're bored, so they embark on a long downward spiral that has them pulling guns on jock bullies, packing fat rolls of crack-smeared 20s, partying with hookers and finally scheming to kill one of their associates.
"What are you guys?" asks the hooker.
"Sort of like a ... club," says Daric.
"What, like, a math club?" she asks, in the movie's cheekiest au revoir to the goodie-goodie model-majority cliche. When the spoilt and wildly unbalanced Virgil starts stuffing his loaded gun into his thong underpants, even the street-smart working girl knows to cut her losses and flee. These boys are on the way down.
Sadly, I have to cite inappropriate, non-Asian films like Boyz N The Hood to assess Better Luck Tomorrow, because there aren't many Asian predecessors. Most notable films on Asian-American themes were made by white guys like Alan Parker (Come See the Paradise), Oliver Stone (Heaven and Earth) and Scott Hicks (Snow Falling on Cedars).
Wayne Wang, Ang Lee and Gregg Araki are the exceptions.
Out here on the Pacific Rim, this seems odd, as the Asian-American experience is all around us. Los Angeles has its own Chinatown, Koreatown, Japantown, Thai Town and Little Tokyo, not to mention many thriving, predominantly Asian enclaves nearby. I've had countless friends with oddly cool hybrid names like Randy Wong and Wayne Thieu, and I was once the only Caucasian in a building whose other occupants were an entire village of Montagnard tribespeople from Laos (they filled in the swimming pool with soil and planted vegetables).
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