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By Al Kratina
July 22, 2007 - 12:12
Big Bang Love: Juvenile A (46-Okunin No Koi)
2006, Japan
Director: Takashi Miike
Writer: Masa Nakamura, From Ikki Kajiwara, Hisao Maki
Cast: Ryuhei Matsuda, Masanobu Ando, Shunsuke Kubozuka, Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Jo Kanamaori
Producers: Shiro Sasaki, Takeshi Watanabe
Rating: Not yet rated
Genre: Mystery
Distributor: Animeigo
Running Time: 85 minutes
Director Takashi Miike’s first effort is an impressive effort for such a young student filmmaker. Combining elements of David Lynch and Lars Von Trier, Miike has created a somewhat derivative but nevertheless interesting examination of the symbolism and artifice inherent in the creation of filmic reality. In the bizarrely named Big Bang Love: Juvenile A, Miike starts with the investigation of a prison murder and takes it to strange places, full of Brechtian distancing techniques and Dada-esque surrealism. Two inmates, Jun and Shiro, are imprisoned on the same day, one for murder and the other for being in that gay samurai film Taboo, the one that caused fatal homosexual panic in over a hundred American males after they accidentally rented the film to watch alongside 8th Diagram Pole Fighter. A strange bond is formed between the two inmates, one that ends in the death of Shiro, presumably at the hands of Jun. The investigation that follows is full of twists and turns, but that’s not the point of the film. The point is Miike’s formal experimentation, his examination of the constructed aspect of film. And granted, while his is certainly not an original thesis, nor are his techniques particularly groundbreaking, for a first film, it’s really quite astounding that he’s showing such aggressive intellectualism in his filmmaking.
Wait. This isn’t his first film? It’s actually his nine-hundred and eightieth? And he’s still ripping off every art film of the past 30 years, from
Lost Highway to
Dogville? What a piece of crap. It’s like he shot it the morning after going to a film aesthetics class with a bad hangover. It’s like he ran out of fake blood and bad digital effects and had to rely on his writing skills, which he forgot to have. It’s like I wasted my time with a derivative art film I could forgive if it was spawned by naiveté, but not if it’s just another schizophrenic stab at success from a director whose philosophy of filmmaking seems to be of the ‘throw enough celluloid at the wall, and hope some of it sticks’ variety. Oh well. We’ll have to see how his next ten films develop.
Rating: 5 on 10
ADDITIONAL BONUS REVIEW BY ALISON ANDERSON:
Sick of reading paragraphs with punctuation and sentences? Here’s some bit-sized capsule reviews, with a handy “Suckometer” scale, that runs from 0 (good) to Suck (not good)
Big bang love: Juvenile A
This movie was very mysterious. Why is that guy doing that? Why was there a spaceship? What is going on? These are some of the many questions I asked myself and the girl beside me who I didn't know. I don't think she liked it. Actually she seemed a little uncomfortable and was totally stingy, I only asked her for a sip of her drink. Takashi Miike manages to do it again, by ‘it’ I mean totally confuse everyone that saw this movie and everyone that I have tried to explain it to.
Big Bang Love: Juvenile A showcases Miike's disjointed storytelling and balances this with minimalist set design. The suck factor in this movie is turned down by its ability to keep me interested but loses points because the level of confusion was high... this may not be the movie's fault.
On a scale of 0 to suck i give it a 4.
- Alison Anderson
