Two words that surely described Japanese director Takeshi Miike are prolific and unpredictable. While there are stylistic threads that can be discerned in much of his work, few directors can claim a body of work that spans such a large swath of the cinematic universe. He’s the filmmaking equivalent of that nineties TV series, The Pretender, and with Big Bang Love, Juvenile A, Miike is has stepped into the shoes of an art film director, creating a work that would be more at home in a side gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art than on a screen in front of a room full of Ichi the Killer fans. The story, as it were, involves two young men admitted to a juvenile detention center on the same day, each for having killed someone. It would be more accurate to say that the film is set not in a detention center, but in the idea of a detention center, since Miike is channelling his best Peter Greenaway meets Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, with a sprinkling of Kiss of the Spider Woman and a pinch of Gattaca. The references abound, the film’s narrative structure recalling Rashômon’s multi-perspective exposition, yet this time with a twist of non-linear presentation, evoking a host of films including The Usual Suspects and Momento.
The plot synopsis on the Netflix sleeve calls it a homoerotic thriller, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch. While the setting is an all male facility in which some of the characters are gay (at least in the situational sense), 
and the costume design is provocative to the point of parody, one would find more homoeroticism in the mainstream movie 300. The film is an adaptation of a Japanese novel, but feels more like poetry than prose. For example, one of the two main characters has a full set of yakuza tatoos, yet not in every scene. Given the subject matter, I think it appropriate if I borrow from Jørgen Leth’s The Perfect Human and say that although I am pleased to have had experienced Big Bang Love, Juvenile A, it is an experience that I hope to understand in a few days.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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