“Getting Any?”– (1994, Japan, 108 minutes – no rating)
In modern day Japan, Asao (Dankan) is an ordinary guy in his thirties living with his grandfather. Asao, however, is driven by an obsession to have sex in a car and soon embarks on an extraordinary journey in this comedy from Takeshi “Beat” Kitano.
“Getting any?” has too many references to other movies (both Japanese and American) to enumerate here, and Kitano even got creative with those.
Things start out innocently enough with Asao going to a car stealership and wasting what little money he has on a couple of clunkers which rapidly fall apart as he cruises the streets offering rides to women in exchange for sex. Unsuccessfully, of course.
Soon, Asao realizes he needs more money to buy a decent car, a nice “convertible”.
What follows are a series of increasingly outrageous adventures as he tries his hand at acting in a version of ‘Zatoichi’ (a role Kitano himself took on a few years later in one of the better versions), robbing banks, mining for gold, impersonating a Yakuza hit-man and finally, guinea pig for an invisibility experiment.
Watch Asao auditioning for an acting gig:
All this to buy a car he can finally have sex in.
Things do go wrong again when a repeat of the experiment transforms Asao into a giant fly-man, which the World Defense Force is tasked with capturing.
Their plan, of course, involves collecting all the crap and manure of Japan, filling a stadium with it and having Japanese folk songs broadcast to attract fly-man Asao.
Perhaps Kitano was telling us what he thinks of folk singing…
Asao on a plane with killer Joe Shishido, ‘enjoys’ flight entertainment:
The editing is a bit weak (Kitano did that too), the pacing is weird in places (Kitano again), Asao’s (Dankan) acting is deadpan-funny, and if you did enjoy “Kentucky Fried Movie”, you really ought to check out “getting any?” whose hero is the only man in Japan who isn’t, you know, doing it…
“Getting any?” gets four jellybeans.
