Cat Among the Pigeons

Cat Among the Pigeons is probably my most favorite of the Hercule Poirot series. Yes I’ve read Miss Marple’s Murder at the Vicarage but that didn’t make as great an impression as this title did. And just yesterday, I finally got to watch the movie as well although the deviation in the plot was a tad bit of a disappointment.

Set against the backdrop of Meadowbank school the revolution at Ramat lays heavy upon this plot. The ruler of Ramat and his friend/confidant Bob Rawlinson are murdered by the rebels. Rumors are abound that the jewels of Ramat have reached Meadowbank through Jennifer Sutcliff, Rawlinson’s niece. Cut onto Meadownbank, the scene opens with the summer term where Miss Bulstrode and her teachers are busy welcoming new and old students. The atmosphere though is rife with an implied sense of doom. As term starts, Jennifer Sutcliff confides in Julia Upjohn her best friend and tennis partner about the robbery at her home. While Julia suspects that this maybe due to the Sutcliffs’ association with the Ramat events, Jennifer dismisses it as usual. This is soon followed by a murder at Meadowbank where the Sports Pavilion is ransacked and its sports mistress is murdered. The school’s image takes a further hit with the occurrence of 2 more murders involving the deputy headmistress and the french mistress . Julia pieces together the events and reaches out to Poirot for help. The question becomes – who is the cat among the pigeons?

As always Ms. Christie has woven a beautiful plot with its unique set of characters making this story unlike any other. The difference truly lies in the fact that she picked something as innocent as a school and its students everyday humdrum and turned it into a atmosphere befitting a crime scene. The participants are not the usual aristocracy or the police but regular students who are caught in the middle yet make it out alive. My favorite character apart from Poirot here is Julia Upjohn – her quickness for grasping the kinks in a situation, her knowledge of the general and foreign affairs coupled with her quick wittedness and common sense makes one believe that she is a detective in making. On the whole a brilliant novel worth a re-read and a special place in the private collection!

Pachelbel Canon in D Major – La corda d’oro

I finally found the version of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major that I wanted to post here…its from the anime – La Corda d’Oro…this is the version I liked the best and the most…

Ranma 1/2

Japanese anime for all its humor or the endless sublime emotions it portrays is quite a complex art. First there is the manga which is converted to a series. The manga by itself is quite complex and read from back to front. I never understood the reason behind this.

And then there is the anime themselves and while the minimum episode limit is atleast 26, mangas on Inu Yasha, Ranma ½ etc can go on up to 200 episodes. While I was discovering anime, I came across this totally comic series – Ranma ½ or Ranma Nibun no Ichi, featuring the travails of a teen called Ranma Satome, a martial arts student cursed to turn into a girl when splashed with cold water and back to his normal self when doused with hot water. The reason for this is that Ranma and his father Genma while making an arduous journey back from the Bayankala mountain range fall into different ‘cursed springs’ at Jusenkyo. These springs are named after the person/animal or thing that drowned in that spring centuries ago, and the person who falls into them turns into that characters when splashed with cold water.

So Ranma falls into the spring of the Drowned Girl while Genma falls into the spring of Drowned Panda. Now Genma as a Panda looks absolutely hilarious and he infact prefers to remain a Panda for majority of the series often communicating using sign posts. Ranma with his cute girl/boy looks attracts countless admirers of both sexes, the main ones being the rather reluctant fiancé Akane Tendo, Shampoo an Amazonian who is hell bent on marrying Ranma and has herself fallen into the cursed spring of Drowned Cat, Tatewaki Kuno who admires both Akane and Ranma’s female version, Ranko, Kodachi Kuno, Ukyo Kuonji to just mention a few. So the whole series features Ranma or rather Ranko escaping various admirers not to mention get out of the schemes his father devises from time to time to get him to marry Akane.

While the series is hilarious to watch, I couldn’t really enjoy it as the episodes progressed for the series never seemed to end. Just when you think that Ranma and Akane might get together, you have Shampoo butting in making sure its back to square one. I found Shampoo to be the most annoying characters ever…she just doesn’t know when to quit. As for Akane, she is quite hard-headed where not required. My favorite character though happens to be Ryoga, Ranma’s best friend and rival, who with his insane sense of bad directions ends up most inconveniently at the ‘cursed springs’ and falls into the cursed spring of Drowned Piglet. To his immense luck and sense of insane timing, he is adopted by an unsuspecting Akane who christens him ‘P-Chan’ much to the annoyance of Ranma. 

The characters themselves are quite complex with each of them having a history of their own. So if you decide to watch this series or happen to be following it, its better to understand the character history to appreciate their roles better.

Blood The Last Vampire

When I first watched this anime movie I was completely lost trying to understand the storyline. And then when I watched it the 2^nd time I realized it was a story on vampires yet again except these ones are called chiropterans.

The story is interesting in its own weird way in the sense some strange alien creature leaves behind 2 humanoid chiropterans (the 1^st of their kind) termed as the Queens and with them starts the whole nuisance of controlling the chiropteran strain which is spreading into the human populous. Now this one and the anime ‘The Vampire Knight’ are a bit similar in concept – there are 3 levels of chiropterans / vampires with level 1 being the most superior of all and deemed as royalty while level 3 is the lowest of the low levels.

In any case, ‘Blood: The Last Vampire’ finally made it to be released as a live-action movie and Saya Otonashi looks way better than her portrayal in the anime. The anime had a dour and morose looking Saya hunting down chiropterans at a military base in search of the original vampire, Onigen. While the live-action seems to have the same storyline there appear to be a couple of twists here and there. I haven’t watched the movie yet I could kind of sense that the plot would be similar to the manga.

Dragonball Evolution produced by 20th Century Fox seems to have bombed at the box office, and while you can’t pinpoint the exact reason for it not taking off so well…I could only surmise that it might be primarily due to the fact that the manga and anime aren’t so well known across other countries yet, and maybe the demography who prefer watching the anime might’ve found it hard to digest a live-action Goku and Piccolo. That’s my guesswork and observation in any case.

So now all I can hope for is that Sony Pictures’ production, ‘Blood: The Last Vampire’ takes off well with the audience. I for one would surely watch this movie just to see how good it is compared to the original anime.

Blood+, a 50 episode anime series, is the spin-off of this original anime. This has a younger and more lost/happier looking Saya trying to discover her origins. It also features Saya’s rival queen/sister Diva whose personality borders on the edge of insanity and sadism not to mention utter ruthlessness.

Saya n Haji vs Diva n Solomon

Then there is the concept of the Chevaliers whose purpose in life is to protect their queens at all costs and while they are powerful too, all that the queen has to do is use her blood to crystallize her opponent’s Chevaliers. While the whole concept of creating an anime around vampires trying to show they can reason is quite amusing, its a tad bit boring too as there are many cliched versions coming up as well. And frankly this series isn’t really a joyful one to begin with…nor is it as hilarious as Ranma 1/2 to laugh out at. Perhaps the only thing I hated about the ending was that it had a sad cliff-hanger with Diva’s babies surviving and Saya going into hibernation. Now what fun is that??

BD Live and Social Networking – Is it Worth the money?

When I first heard of Blu-ray discs, I simply shrugged it off as yet another new technology fad that’ll soon tone down. But I was mistaken for when I visited the DVD stores I found a whole shelf dedicated to blu-ray titles. What piqued my curiosity about Blu-ray was the numerous articles I had come across as part of the domain research.

I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of what is Blu-ray but suffice to say I’d like to voice out my thoughts on BD Live/BDJ and their growing impact on social networking. The most interesting news I’ve seen so far in this space was Warner Bros initiative to release ‘Watchmen’ with BD Live features that integrate it with Facebook. Apart from amazing picture and sound qualities these discs have to offer, the new features enable existing Blu-ray users to:

1. Connect their BD Buddy community to their Facebook community
2. Organize joint movie viewings, exchange comments while watching a movie or in certain movies have a live chat session with the Director
3. Download lots of marketing material like the posters, wallpapers, ringtones etc on the go with a Blu-ray Disc.

Cool isn’t it?!! Compared to your normal DVD with its 2D interactivity where the menu and its options are preset, BD offers you a 3D outlook with the chance to add to the content existing on the disc and you can download your choice of content.

Other possibilities that could be explored in terms of making the movie more interactive is:

• Make your own endings – DVDs come with 2-3 alternate endings which you can view via the menu option. What if I want to view the movie with my favorite alternate ending? I can either download the alternate scene online or select it from the menu, and maybe select an option ‘play the movie with alternative ending’. This would let me watch the movie with my favorite ending scene. Wouldn’t this be useful while watching a movie like ‘Atonement’ or ‘X-Men: Origins’??
• Also what if I want to watch the movie with the deleted scenes? Is it possible to introduce the snippets into the actual movie?
• Join a Live Discussion Forum – I haven’t done any groundwork on if this feature is available presently but if I were the type of person who’d love to start a discussion forum on the movie or join one, can I get the option to do it via the BD Live option?
• Integrating Web 2.0 features with BD Live is another possibility. Its quite endless since the technology behind all this is BD Java. Now whatever little understanding I have of Java from technical angle, I know for sure it presents a huge scope to represent your imagination!
• Anime series on Blu-ray – Fans of Pokemon or Dragonball will get a chance to explore interactive features like maybe playing around with the players power levels or evolving a pokemon with Blu-ray. And the marketing material that can be pushed to the users can be endless in case of the Anime.

The ones I’ve listed out here are just what I felt are the possibilities with BD J technology. And these are just the tip of the iceberg so to say!

While all these factors add to the zing, I wondered how far people would really utilize all these amazing features that the major studios are currently dabbling with.

Do you really have the time to connect with BD Live mates with your Facebook mates and actually have such detailed discussions on a movie? Unless you are an ardent fan of the Spiderman or say X-Men, would you really bother having a live discussion with the director or the cast? Not to mention the cost factor, higher functionality would mean a premium price and a new BD player that would also have to play your old DVD collection.

So while movie trivia or interviews by directors might certainly not be my concern, I’d surely be interested if the disc offered a couple of casual or PC based games that I could play on my laptop or a game console. Apart from the downloadable content, this is another option which I would deem as value for money, considering I’m shelling out money for a disc with space worth 50GB.