Getting Any? (1995)

From the acclaimed director Takeshi Kitano [Fireworks, Kikujiro] comes a bizarre, over the top and absurd comedy full of slapstick silliness and never ending gags. A great satire of Japanese society and popular cinema, Getting Any?, embraces the spirit of Kitano’s early stand-up and television work and as such it offers a genuine inside look into his true personality. The story follows the nerdy middle age Asao, a professional daydreamer, whose one and only goal in life is - as the title suggests - to get laid. Asao embarks on a series of slapstick adventures in search of fulfilling his ultimate fantasy - making wild passionate sex with a woman. His holy quest for sex lands Asao in a series of absurd situations, involving robbery schemes, big movie productions, yakuza gang rivalry wars and scientific experiments. Getting Any? may be very episodic and perhaps even pointless in the grand scheme of things, but for those willing to go for it, it's a hoot from start to finish.

 Getting Any?
I love Takeshi Kitano's dramas which exemplify the best of what I enjoy about Japanese cinema. I had experienced some of his style of comedy with his redux on Zatoichi but nothing could have compared me for his in/famous comedy Getting Any?, a film that when it flopped drove him into depression that was part of the cause of his accident that paralyzed half of his face. Part of the reason I wanted to watch this was Kitano's recent comedies Takeshis' and the unreleased Hooray Director that gets released in June.
So enough of that jib-jab, hows the movie? It definitely is what could be termed insane with a tone that matches something like Kentucky Fried Movie throwing one idea for jokes into the next with reckless abandon. Describing the plot is almost impossible in my opinion. The basic idea is that thirty-five year old Asao decides to get a car he can have sex in. Whent the several ideas at procuring the car go awry, he then plans to get money to get a first class ticket on a plane because of course the flight attendants have sex with the first class passengers. Where it goes from there is a bizzare off kilter experience that can only be described as a surreal journey of the odd-ball.
Comedies are hard to rate since like horror films they only work for certain members of the audience. Some will like this film while others will absolutely hate it. Me I can definitely attest that I laughed quiet a bit at the film. Despite the overload of the jokes there were some that were indeed humorous to my sensibility. But while there were jokes I laughed at I do admit that a lot of the jokes probably work better for Japanese audiences, and some of those jokes at times are taken to such extremes that they overstay their welcome so to speak. For the most part as well while I liked a lot of the humor the last half of them didn't really work as well as the first despite the presence of Kitano himself playing an oddball scientist.
I guess all I can say to end it is probably the perfect way to end all positive reviews of caution, see it at your own risk. February 20, 2007

 Silly, stupid, but really really funny
One of the stupidest, most bizarre, and straight up perverted movies I've seen in a long time, but it was friggin' funny as hell. If you can handle 'stupid funny' then this movie is definitely enjoyable. Loosely organized around the fact that this perverted guy wants to score badly.... so he goes off and tries many different means to accomplish this task. The end degenerates into a big of a Godzilla parody, but still funny. Be sure to stick around for the end of the credits too. August 2, 2005

 Don't be fooled, no one "gets" anything in this film
I am a fan of "Beat" Kitano Takeshi. I laughed during parts of this movie. Yet I haven't felt more of a let-down watching a movie than when I saw "Getting Any?" (Mina yatteru ka?). This was Takeshi's first film from his production company Office Kitano and like one reviewer suggested, it has a kind of amateurish quality. This is not the same director who gave us "Fireworks" or "Zatoichi (remake)".

The film is funny for the first 15-25 minutes: as sketch comedy, it is very funny but then swings out of control into longer bits where the protagonist (one of Takeshi's disciples Dankan) becomes involved in film (as a replacement for, of all things, Katsu Shintaro (aka Zatoichi)) and then poses as a Yakuza hitman and finally the movie copies Cronenberg/Goldblum's "The Fly" (with some Mothra pastiche thrown in). The movie is a mess.

My wife, who is Japanese, likes Takeshi, but said the film creeped her out: women are excessively portrayed as sexual objects. True: this is coming the mind of a moronic protagonist whose ultimate goal in life is "Car Sex" -- sort of like giving Dustin Hoffman's Raymond character in "Rain Man" a hard time for holding up "People's Court" as the best the American Justice system has to offer...

The pacing of the film is so bad that I'm giving it 1 star. Perhaps only die-hard fans of Takeshi's HUMOR (not his dramas) would appreciate this film. Thankfully, the director greatly improved in his follow-up films. July 25, 2005

 Occasionally funny
I really wanted to like this film, because it is silly, and weird, and has cute topless girls in it. But I found that it was very amateurishly executed. It may have been on purpose, because apparently film maker is quite famous, and he says he is making fun of himself as a film maker. But it just did not work for me, sorry. October 31, 2004

 Weird yet funny Kitano comedy
Kitano's approach to comedy is quite twisted, yet it works well for most parts of this movie. Although, certain scenes could've been shorter. However, there are so many little subtle jokes planted all over the film, and I'm not talking about jokes that only the Japanese audience would understand or appreciate.
It seems to me that Kitano was greatly influenced by the Monty Python series as this movie definitely resembles the structure of that show, but that's not a bad thing. So if you want to see Kitano's comic interpretation on Japanese pop culture and society don't miss this weird comedy. September 24, 2003

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