So I saw Better Luck Tomorrow, which is definitely not about the MIT blackjack team. Rather, it's about my high school. Or, at least, it might as well be. It's funny; I've seen my share of teenage movies, but this is the first one that actually reminded me, forcibly, with almost every shot, of my own high school experience. The locations are almost unbearably evocative of my hometown: it might as well have been shot in Castro Valley, up near the gated communities with cacti in the front lawns and Acuras in the driveways where most of my friends seemed to live. Maybe for this reason, it feels to me like the slickest and most expensive Video Production project of all time; I can imagine me and my friends making this movie in our backyards and at Castro Valley High School as a sort of a wish fulfillment exercise where we got to be badassed thugs for the camera. Which is to say: it's a bit lame, it never manages to work up much of a rhythm, and despite a nice Wong Kar-Wai type inconclusive ending (complete with a cut to black), the director is no Wong Kar-Wai...but it's always amazing to recognize yourself, or the world you came from, on a movie screen, and Better Luck Tomorrow comes closer to capturing the feel of three or four years of my life than any other movie I've seen.