City Hunter:
.357 Magnum
80 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
04/08/2003
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City Hunter:
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My laptop broke, again. I'm tired of this crap. The $2200 for a computer already a couple years old at the time didn't push me over the edge, nor did the THREE power cords that broke from what could only be considered normal use. But now the actual thing that the power cord plugs into is broken and makes a really creepy humming noise when I plug the AC Adapter in. So I basically can't use my laptop because I'm afraid it's a fire hazard now and the battery doesn't charge anyway. Great, thanks a lot Apple, and thank you even more St. Joseph's University department of Criminal Justice. So what am I doing now? Well, I'm writing reviews to appease my growing fanbase, or something along those lines. Gone are the days of sitting in my bed looking up hilarious (i.e.: boring) internet humor while Bare plays his Role Playing Games or Kyle decides that we're going to watch some anime DVD. I can only reminisce with a soft pang in my beleaguered heart, recalling the day not so long past where I had my laptop near and dear to me, sitting on the top bunk of Room ten of Hogan Hall. My mind sullenly remembers the elation felt when typing up the notes to accompany this review. It almost seems sacrilegious to use them, so my writing style might be a little less coherent than usual. |
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Much like that Apple laptop, I'll never really know what forces, internal or external, has caused me to enjoy City Hunter as much as I do. I mean, it seems kind of counter intuitive on the one hand. You've got your slapsticky humor and your incredibly perverted guy and that's about as much as I can handle in anime. You might as well throw the towel in right there. But wait, you'd be jumping the gun! Did we mention that said perverted guy is also a detective? City Hunter has always had me at 'Hello' for that one little fact alone, after all, you're reading the words of someone who wishes Bladerunner was a documentary almost every day. Can you imagine a life of not only killing robots, but getting PAID to do it? Nothing but pure euphoria would follow. However, such is not the world of City Hunter, much to the chagrin of the anime community as a whole,** City Hunter is the story of Ryo Saeba and the Saeba agency. Ryo is the aforementioned sexually lascivious man, and Kaori is his partner, assumedly, and the woman who keeps him in check with various implements of insanity, all of which are hated by me. Purely from a physical standpoint, I have no idea where she's keeping these things, and if there's any implication of sexuality in my last sentence then I don't think I WANT to know where she's keeping them. I mean, come on, isn't the giant hammer thing a little played out? |
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It certainly is, but that's not the end of the anime clichés you're gonna find here. Ryo and Kaori are on the case, trying to protect a young Russian girl. Well, I don't think they explicitly say whether or not she's of Russian descent, but the actor was certainly trying their damnedest to get that thick, Eastern Asia tone to their voice and I'm gonna give them what I can in that regard. Russian or not, this chick Nina's got something that only Ryo can protect for whatever god-awful reason. You know, I always wonder about these things. Like there isn't a more qualified detective around, or at least one that isn't gonna try and handle the merchandise at every available opportunity. You know, in America we've got a name for people who hang around on street corners and shout shameless sexual euphemisms at female passersbys, yeah, they're called hobos. Apparently in Japan all the hobos carry guns and get paid for solving crimes in between begging for money and dirtying city streets. Don't ask me man, it's a seriously weird place over there. |
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But when you put a red headed chick in a suit, as the 1980's were wont to do, all is forgiven in my book. There's something just so... right about that I'm at a loss to but it into any kind of sensible word pattern. I find myself only cursing my lot in life for not providing me with a short haired, bow tied wearing beauty. Some might find my likes odd, but I can honestly say I don't care. After all, am I supposed to take romantic advice from people who would watch "comedy" of the City Hunter variety? Certainly not, I've based the last eight years of my life on the idea that I must distance myself from the common anime fan as much as possible. And seeing as how I don't live in my mother's basement, I'd say I'm doing a pretty good job of that right now. But that doesn't mean I can't enjoy something that is without great intellectual allusion from time to time. I'm not totally against humor in anime, I usually just don't get it. I don't get it here, but that's okay, because if I did I probably wouldn't enjoy sitting down and watching it as much as I do. There's a detective, there's guns, there's a huge black guy that would probably stand out like some horrid carbuncle in Japan, if City Hunter were to approach things from any kind of realistic scope. But that's all okay. For some strange reason my heart is warmed by City Hunter, it's not great... but at least it's better than my laptop is gonna look after I get done with it. |
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