Yesterday afternoon, I found myself suddenly full of a desire to watch something extravagantly produced, and when it became apparent that the Mononoke files Funeral had on his hard drive were of shit quality, I set to the highly time-consuming task of downloading the years-old show and, in the meantime, decided to finally resume watching another show on the hard drive to which my sights had been turned for quite some time: The Big O. I already knew a good deal about The Big O from having seen bits and pieces of it on Cartoon Network ‘back in the day’, and likewise read a fair share of series commentary and reviews, but I had never managed to see enough of the show proper in the correct order to say with any certainty what, exactly, happens in it. It was as I began to watch that I became interested in just how much this series was utterly steeped in the tropage of film noir.
Oddly enough, film noir is a genre that I know almost entirely from the sidelines. The only real noir films I had seen before today were the likes of Sin City and bits and pieces of Bladerunner, in spite of the fact that I knew all of the genre’s tropes by heart and was a huge fan of many of those tropes as well. It was perhaps because my experience with whatever noir films I must have seen before lead me to believe that every noir film was criminally slow that I always considered the genre to be something I probably couldn’t handle. These days, though, I can handle a slow pace pretty well, and the more that I see and learn about the noir genre, the more that I realize it is truly the perfect genre for me.
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My Sword Is Unbelievably Dull 