The Movie: Better Luck Tomorrow is a no budget film that eventually got picked up for distribution by MTV Films, and perhaps the greatest depiction of what it was like being an Asian high school kid in Orange County that I have ever seen, at least as far as the academic life of things is concerned. Based, or perhaps more accurately, inspired by the 1992 murder of Stuart Tay, student at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, CA -- a school known for its abundance of overachieving Asian students -- which made huge waves in the Asian-American media, but went virtually unnoticed by the rest of the world.

The premise of the film is that as long as these kids' grades were up, their parents didn't really give a damn what the hell else their kids were getting into. The kids could just say they were going off to study, and that would leave them free until 4 AM to do whatever the hell they wanted. So what first starts out as a group of students making a few bucks on the side selling cheat sheets escalates into drugs, violence, and all sorts of trouble.

It isn't the greatest film I've ever seen, but again, my ability to relate to the world of the film, having been part of it, really, makes it a little more special to my heart, and it's definitely not a bad movie. And most of the guys that I know have seen this movie were very much taken in by leading lady Karin Anna Cheung.

While the plot is interesting enough, I have always had issue with the age of the actors in this movie. Let's just face it, they are way too old to be believable as high school students. I mean, sure, Asians are known to be youthful looking, but it's just too much of a stretch, especially for the character "Han", who seemed like the older cousin, out of school... I was totally shocked to see him in a later scene eating lunch at the school. I couldn't believe he was actually supposed to be a student, that's how old he looks.

On the other hand, Han is my favorite character, being the badass that he is. So yeah, while this isn't exactly the greatest film, it's not too bad, and of course, a mid-movie on-location trip to Vegas never hurts anything! So check it out if you're looking for something a little different, or maybe you want to see what it is really like in "The O.C.", which could perhaps be summed up in the phrase "Well, at least it'll look good on my college applications."

The DVD: The sharp anamorphic transfer on this disc actually had better contrast and bolder colors than either of the two times I had actually seen it on film. Definitely better than I was expecting to see it. The audio was average at best, with average sound quality and minimal use of the surround channels. I'm not even sure that the original film had any kind of surround sound at all.

The only special feature on this fairly bare-bones disc is audio commentary by director Justin Lin and the writers, which turned out to be rather uninspiring. You'd think with a low budget film like this there would be plenty of interesting stories to tell about the production, but actually you end up with a lot of dead air on this commentary track.

Overall though, it's a decent DVD release for a decent movie that might be of special interest to some people out there.