Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
min'na yatteruka, July 15, 2003
I was first exposed to the filmic works of Kitano Takeshi more than half a decade ago when the teachers of my Japanese language class screened Kikujiro the class after our midterm. Charmed by the film, I hurriedly purchased Hana-bi, A Scene at the Sea, and Kids Return. What struck me about his films was that there was no set formula, even though the same actors appear in his films, or detailed theme, but each film contained its own melancholy, surrealism, and playfulness that, although completely and firmly set in Kitano's filmic world.
However, although I enjoy each of the above mentioned films, the film that I have used to introduce a number of my friends to the films of Kitano Takeshi is Getting Any?, a film that is often consider by both Japanese and Western critics to be Kitano's lewdest, most hackneyed film that completely fails at being a comedy. Well, I enjoyed the film and, besides Kikujiro, I have watched it more times than any other Kitano film. Why? Because its brand of surrealism set in modern Japan is a rarity to be found in the filmscape of Japanese cinema.
Getting Any?, Min'na yatteruka?, centers upon the life of Asao, a deadpan, seemingly emotionless fellow whose main goal in life seems to be buying a car and getting a girl with whom he can engage in "car sex." Unfortunately, Asao has little money and can only afford lemons that fall apart almost immediately after he purchases them. Undeterred, Asao decides to do a number of things to make money such as selling a relative's organs, robbing a bank, by first going through an elaborate scheme to make his own pistol, robbing an armored car, and becoming an actor. The "plotline" of Asao having sex with a girl in his new car falls by the wayside at the middle of the film when he becomes a gangster and later the fly man. Haphazard, surreal, and just plain insane, Getting Any? makes for an interesting film viewing experience.
Film scholar Aaron Gerow states that Getting Any? is more than just a display of the bifurcated nature of Kitano Takeshi in his personas of Beat Takeshi the film/television actor and Kitano the director, but that it is an attack against the setting of formulaic, staged comedy. Kitano, who considers Getting Any as his magnum opus, supposedly made Getting Any? intentionally unfunny in order to strike against the prosaic, threadbare nature of Japanese comic television to show how empty and lame it really is without the accompanying glitz of television. If this is the case or not, Getting Any? is definitely not a typical comedy which will leave many, both Western and Japanese, scratching their heads.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The funny side of Kitano, May 16, 2003
Though it cannot be listed amongst Kitano's best work, Getting Any is still a lot of fun to watch. It really shows the other side of Takeshi Kitano, and what he used to do when he was doing stand-up comedy. This film cannot [or shouldn't] really be compared to Kitano's other work, since it's theme is so radically different. Getting Any belongs to a different category, and it should be treated accordingly. As a comedy it stands alone among Kitano's other films, yet elements of his comic style can be found in all of those other films as well. Many people compare this movie to Monty Python films, and I think they are quite right; and just like the Monty Python films Getting Any requires multiple viewings to get all the subtle jokes. That also means that one can watch this movie several times and not get tired of its humor. The yakuza sequences are especially priceless [you can watch them over and over again]. This film will certainly entertain both the hardcore Kitano fans and the casual viewers as well.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Totally mad, totally infectious, November 24, 2002
A small group of my friends and I have something of a cult fascination with this film, Takeshi Kitano's absolutely deranged slapstick comedy about a man obsessed with having sex in a car. Kitano got his start in standup comedy, after all, and this movie is like a compilation of all those gags he never got to pull with the audiences who went to see his stony, blunt-nosed nihilist masterpieces like "Violent Cop."Asao (Japanese comedian Dankan) is a nerdy man with one goal in life: passionate sex in a car. But he's got no car, and no girl, so what's a guy to do? The movie catalogues his misadventures, ranging from joining the yakuza to becoming an actor, working in a gun factory, trying (and trying, and TRYING) to rob a bank, and eventually participating in a human-invisibility experiment that goes horribly wrong. There's no telling what happens in the next five minutes, and that's both the movie's charm and its shortcoming: it's as unpredictable as it is aimless. Many of Kitano's regulars (Korean actor Hakuryu, Dankan himself, and so on) are in the cast, along with tons of other familiar comedic faces from Japan. The whole thing's scored with a crazy-quilt of Japanese pop ballads that's addictive enough that you wonder why they never released a soundtrack to go with it. But is the movie funny? Oh, god yes. It's deranged, absolutely screwloose humor on the order of "Airplane," although some of the jokes may fly right over some people's heads. What do you say, for instance, to a scene where Asao talks in a kind of Japanese Pig Latin that involves inverting each pair of syllables in a word, and requires subtitles for the JAPANESE speakers in the audience? Or the ending sequence, where they make fun of every rubber-monster man-in-suit movie out of Japan from Godzilla up through the Ultraman series? Or the yakuza boss who's secretly a cross-dressing masochist who gets off on being slapped with ping-pong paddles? I could go on, but you get the point. It's crazy, it's freaky, and if you ain't with it, then you just ain't with it.
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