Getting Any?

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Getting any?
Directed by Takeshi Kitano
Produced by Masayuki Mori
Hisano Nabeshima
Taiko Yoshida
Written by Takeshi Kitano
Starring Beat Takeshi
Dankan
Sonomanma Higashi
Tokie Hidari
Shouji Kobayashi
Music by Joe Hisaishi
Cinematography Katsumi Yanagishima
Editing by Takeshi Kitano
Yoshinori Oota
Distributed by Flag of Japan Nippon Herald Films
Flag of Japan Herald-Ace
Flag of Japan Office Kitano
Release date(s) February 02, 1995
Running time 110 min
Language Japanese
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Getting Any? (みんな～やってるか！ Minnā yatteru ka!?, literally: "Is everyone doing it?") is a 1995 Japanese film, written, directed, edited, and starring, Japanese filmmaker Takeshi Kitano.

Yatteru (やってる) is the colloquial form for yatteiru (やっている), yatteru coming from the Japanese verb yaru, which is an informal word meaning 'to do', and has become slang for sexual intercourse.

Getting Any? is best described as a sex comedy movie. It showed Beat Takeshi, originally a very popular manzai performer, returning to his comedic roots. The movie features an Airplane!-like assemblage of comedic scenes centering around a Walter Mitty-type character whose obsession is to have sex.

The film met with little acclaim in Japan where its release was barely noticed. However the film maker confessed in 2003 (while in production for Zatoichi), that Getting Any? was one of his three favourite movies among the ten he had directed by that time. According to him, this work is the basis for all his upcoming movies (including the acclaimed HANA-BI) as it features all his recurrent themes and it gets his part of violence, and even its part of sadness (i.e. all efforts deployed by Asao to have sex).

According to an interview, Kitano's purpose in this movie was to laugh at his own gags, to make a mockery of them. He also wanted to laugh at the young Japanese men, those born after World War II who are simple-minded and much too direct and simplistic when it comes to talk with girls about having sex. Kitano denied satirizing Japanese society, and claimed that his aim in this movie was to make the audience laugh.

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[edit] Plot

In Getting any? Minoru Iizuka, aka Dankan, (Boiling Point) plays as Asao, a naive and goofy man who lives with his grandfather in Saitama. (His mother and younger sister, appearing in later scenes, live in Tokyo.) Even though Asao is 35 years old, he is totally inexperienced with girls, but he absolutely wants to get laid. One day as he watches an erotic TV film, he realizes that all he needs to get girls and sex is a fancy car, so he runs to the closest car dealer.

In the TV film, the male character got a Porsche 911 Cabriolet, so Asao aims for a luxury import car dealer. To the seller asking what kind of cars he's looking for, Asao naively answers that he wants "a car for having sex". After trying a cabriolet, with the assistance of a totally helpful hostess, Asao confesses he is strapped. All he can afford is a used domestic budget-car, so he's forced to buy a Honda Today, a modest K-car which is totally cheap compared to the Mercedes-Benz, Rolls Royce, Aston Martin and Ferrari displayed in the show room.

Then, he quickly restages the scene he has seen in the TV film, with the help of a female mannequin, before aiming for street girls. Quickly, Asao realizes that male-female sociorelations are not as simple as in porno, and that real life girls are not as naive as in fiction works.

After several humiliating and unsuccessful tries, Asao comes to the conclusion that roadsters are more efficient. Such cars are expensive but Asao is without money, so he asks his grandfather to help him. After cashing in his grandfather's liver and kidneys, he returns to the car dealer. The seller convinces him to buy an Austin Healey Sprite MkI, a classic British roadster, but once he learns how much money Asao really has (only 1/4 of the funds he had the first time), he changes his mind and sells him an Eunos Roadster, a popular Japanese roadster, claiming it is the same car. When Asao insists, the seller claims the '50s Austin-Healey was old-fashioned and the Eunos is a better model for cruising. The Eunos is driven a few meters and starts falling apart. Asao complains to the seller, but the latter is a conman and refuses to talk with him any more, so Asao picks up the fallen pieces and attaches them to the back of his car.

The young man tries his luck anyway with girls on the street, but doesn't succeed, so he finally sells his wrecked car to a local salvage company.

As he walks home, he finds an apparently abandoned, parked, Mazda RX-7 Series 5 Turbo (FC), and he decides to steal it. Asao drives a few miles when he encounters a young woman walking along the road and decides to talk to her, as shown in the erotic film, but the sports car does not brake anymore and he runs over the girl, and crashes the car in a display panel. He is lucky enough to not get hurt and he leaves the coupé (he doesn't care about the woman).

Asao imagines stewardesses are naked and offer "on-board sex service" to 1st class 747 customers, so he decides to travel by plane. Since he does not have any money, he will do an armed bank robbery, but first he needs a weapon, so he heads to Kawaguchi City (near Tokyo) where he will be able to make his own revolver in the local iron foundry.

Eventually, he has many adventures such as joining the yakuza, becoming Zatoichi, becoming invisible, and getting transformed into a giant fly-man ala The Fly. The movie ends with his capture after diving into a large reservoir of feces. After the credits, there is a scene where Asao jumps around Tokyo (as the fly-man) before landing/getting impaled on the Tokyo Tower.

[edit] References and parodies

Much of the film satirizes popular Japanese culture from the '50s up to the '80s, including cinema, TV series, anime, and pop music.

Unlike popular western beliefs, the inspiration for the fly-man (not The Fly) and the toumei ningen (transparent man) are not Hollywood movies but a local 1957 horror movie directed by Mitsuo Murayama, called Transparent Man & Fly-Man (透明人間と蝿男). It is uncertain if the Tōmei ningen (Japanese version of The Invisible Man) hunting suits wore by the Doctor and his assistant are a reference to Ivan Reitman's 1984 SF-comedy Ghostbusters or to an older classic Japanese movie; the latter is more probable as the design seems vintage. The alternative ending, which comes after the end credits, features the familiar reference to Steven Spielberg E.T., the character flying by the moon.

Getting Any? also features some guest stars including Masumi Okada (playing as Stalin) and Akiji Kobayashi (as leader of the Terrestrian Forces from Ultraman).

[edit] Cinema

[edit] TV series

[edit] Anime

[edit] Music

[edit] Scatological humour

Questioned about the scatological gags used in his movie, Takeshi Kitano answered that excrements and manure were a common source of humor in Japan since the country was traditionally an agricultural worker's land.

A French interviewer even asked the film maker if the giant dirt, seen near the end of the movie, was a metaphor for the decadence of the Japanese society, but Kitano laughed and answered that not at all, it was only meant as a "local color" joke.

[edit] Sources

  • Takeshi Kitano video interview featured in the Getting Any? DVD published by Cheyenne Films (EDV 1040), France (2003).

[edit] External links

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Films directed by Takeshi Kitano