NYAFF 2011: BTS: BETTER THAN SEX Review

[Once again, a round of applause to Mark Popham.]

Ever since getting a screener of BTS: Better Than Sex in the mail, I kept bragging to people about the Taiwanese teen sex comedy I had to watch. I had to leave work right on time to watch this Taiwanese teen sex comedy! I couldn't go to trivia, because there it was, a Taiwanese teen sex comedy sword of Damocles, hanging over my head. In my mind, I built it up to be some sort of zany Taiwanese Porky's, and of course it had to pull the rug out from under me, being both less zany and more genuinely weird than I had expected.

It is also, by its very nature, extremely hard to recap, as the narrative skips between several characters. BTS: Better Than Sex is the story of Lin (Michael Wong), a disaffected, monstrously-hung 17 year old, suffering from an existential crisis after his porn-store mentor dies of a broken heart. It is the story of Tam, his ex-classmate, now robbing convenience stores with a Wolverine-like tazer holster. It is also the story of three moronic hoodlums, a magic sword and their maniacal, shit-smeared cop nemesis, as well as the story of a Japanese television show about capturing delinquent teens with nets helmed by a depressed ex-Yakuza.

All of these characters intersect, their lives weaving around each other in an MTV-influenced shaggy dog story which manages to be both intermittently humorous and affecting. It is definitely the first movie to both draw me in emotionally and feature so much spontaneous ejaculation. As Su Chao-bin's first feature as both writer and director, it definitely suffers from some loose editing, and the parallel structure- which combines a meandering, La Ronde-like storyline with temporal flashbacks- can occasionally be a little confusing.

The overall "moral"- that sex, no matter how good alone, is much better with love- is a little threadbare, but the fact that it's related about half-way through the film by a porn store proprietor in front of industrial machine footage helps give it a bit of a zing. In fact, the entire film is like that- it may be weird, and have a lot of masturbation montages, but its heart is in the right place. Oh, and- just in case you were wondering if it fulfills the generic requirements of a teen sex comedy- there is at least one pair of breasts visible in the film.

BTS: Better Than Sex screens at NYAFF, Thursday, July 7th ONLY. More Info and tickets at NYAFF's website.