Getting Any? / Minna yatteruka! / (1994)

Before he became known as Takeshi Kitano the movie director, Beat Takeshi was one of Japan’s most popular comedians. Getting Any? is his only foray into screen comedy as a writer/director. As the title suggests,*  it is about sex, or more specifically the lengths to which a young man might go to get some.

Asao dreams that he could get a woman if he just had a car. This leads to a series of sight gags that could have come out of an American silent movie. When he finally gives up on the car, he decides that first-class air passengers have stewardesses dropping their clothes for them and becomes a bank robber to get the money for a ticket.

The quick succession of sight gags continues as all his robberies go wrong. Then he decides to become an actor, at which we launch into a series of longer movie parodies. As an extra, he accidentally kills Zatoichi then tries to take over the role himself. He flies in a private plane and accidentally kills Jo Shishido (not played by Jo Shishido) and has to become a hitman in his place for a series of yakuza gags. At last he decides to become invisible and winds up as a guinea pig in a lab run by Kitano himself in a Moe Howard haircut. A lab accident turns Asao into a giant fly, which leads us into a Mothra parody for our ending (or two endings; if you stay through the credits on some copies you will see Asao/Flyman escape and then get killed in a new way).

Asao is played by Duncan (also known as Dankan), one of the two young men in Boiling Point, with the same blank deadpan as Kitano often used for his own persona in his yakuza movies. That deadpan often suggests Buster Keaton but without the physical agility and many of the gags still work well because of this dead-pan approach. The first thirty minutes, at least to me, were often laugh out loud funny. The longer sequences, especially the Zatoichi and Mothra scenes, are less successful, in part because they are such easy targets for parody and Kitano doesn’t really develop any jokes not obvious to an average 13-year-old boy with such targets  (amazingly, though there are manure jokes there are no fart jokes).

So, like any similar comedic movie without a real plot, it is a bit hit or miss. It is culturally interesting in part because we have very few Japanese comedies available in America. More interesting, however, is how its relationship with the car is so far behind America’s. Young American males have assumed that a cool car, especially a convertible, will get you girls since the 1920s. By the fifties, movies had noticed that the use of the back seat of a car for teen sex was common, even if the Code didn’t allow any direct depictions of the act itself. It is striking to see that in Japan, with its famous automobile companies and road system, the correlation of car and sexual attraction is only appearing on screen so many years later. Throughout the eighties, the cool vehicle for attracting girls was the motorcycle, and even in Kitano’s Boiling Point of 1990, the young leading man takes his waitress girlfriend away on his scooter.

But then much of the subject matter is also at least thirty years out of date. Zatoichi, Jo Shishido in his hitman phase, or Mothra and similar cheap-o Japanese sci-fi movies date from the sixties (though Mothra had just seen a revival in 1992), so the jokes are built more around what the potential audience would have seen in TV re-runs than in movie theaters of the time, if they have seen them at all.

Though there are a lot of bare breasts, it is hardly a sex comedy. The sex scenes Asao imagines are so phony that we begin to wonder if he really has never had sex or even seen a pinku film.

Most comedies are made with low budgets, but even by the standards of straight-to-video movies of the eighties, this is obviously a low budget affair. It is hard to believe but nonetheless apparently true that despite his immense TV popularity and the western success of Sonatine, Kitano still had problems finding financing for his movies. Even in this one comedy, he refused to either headline or to play in the comic manner for which he was known in his own country. In that sense, at least, he continued a tradition that had begun with the Art Theater Guild, of choosing to make the movie you want the way you want, even if you have to make it on a shoestring. Why he wanted to make this one in particular is inexplicable. Nevertheless, as I said earlier, many of the gags still work very well, though the movie as a whole wears out its welcome after about an hour, just because it is only a series of gags, not a story, much less a plot.

* The movie starts with another title, until someone shouts “Wrong Title!” and it is removed to be replaced with a new set of Kanji characters that seems far too long for the Japanese title.