Mysteries of mystery spot

Visiting a lot of places grants you the virtue of reviewing them and here I am reviewing one of the places I visited last weekend. The Mystery spot, Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is a small town situated around 35 miles to the south of San Jose. Santa Cruz boasts of a beautiful beach, a theme park and mystery spot. Now before we headed for it, I did some homework about it over the net and found it to be a good place to visit. However, the whole story was not as honky dory as the homework was.

The first mistake we did was to go on a tour without a person who knows to drive a car and of course without a car. Nevertheless, the took the greyhound bus to the place from greyhound station of San Jose. The journey took alomst 1 hour and there we were estranged at the Santa Cruz bus stand , clueless as there were no taxis around to take. After a wait of almost 1.5 hours at the bus stand and many calls to the call taxi service, finally we found a taxi at around 12. Mystery spot is in the outskirts of this small town, in deep red wood forests. Next, came the shocker, we had a huge sunday crowd there. We stood for the tickets and and got the tickets for the 3 pm tour. Even though there were 45 minutes tour starting every 12 minutes. That was the amount of rush there. So we were left waiting for another 2 hours for our tour.

Now to the tour, as every other thing in US the tour started bang on time and we got a nice tour guide. Mystery spot is a place where the laws of gravity go haywire.

The first thing we saw here was a plain platform. With one part of it inside the mystery spot border and the other outside it. The magic here was the difference of height between 2 persons who stand there. The difference in their heights vary a lot when they change places. To be precise, one looks to be shorter when he is inside the mystery spot boundaries.

The next thing to experience was the uphill climb. The slope which looked to be less steep was difficult to climb and the slope which appeared more steep was easier.

By the time we finished climbing, we reached a tilted wooden hut. This was built for the purpose of tourist attraction only and it was built straight. But due to the mysterious gravitational force here, it started tilting on its own and here it was tilted at about 15 degree. If you are inside the house, ideally you should be tilting at the same angle as the house but thats not the case. Wherever you stand in the house you are tilted at the same standard angle of 17 degree. Now to prove this point, there are planks in the room with a different angle so that you can stand countering the tilted angle of the house. But again you stand tilted at the same 17 degree.
Here, we saw things rolling upwards on the plank indicating the anamoly in the gravitational force.

At the other side of the house, we were shown some more instances of height illusion on a flat plank and then our small mystery tour was over.

Now I won't call this place breathtaking probably because you are really not allowed to spend your own time and do some research on the things over here, and thats probably because, we don't know what is wrong where and it would take a long time to discover things yourself. And seeing the sunday rush expecting this is too much. But at 5 $ ticket, and in a car's drive from San Jose this place is definitely worth. What more, you can flaunt some very brilliant photos and videos.

My contribution on you tube.

One more trivia about this place is that, the owner wanted to buy the flat piece of land which is currently parking place for mystery spot. The owner was forced to buy the mountain which is the mystery spot earning thousands of dollars every day.

Another very mysterious aspect of the place was what do Indians have to do with this mystery spot? I mean more than 60% of the crowd there was indian. It was not a one day story. Prove to this, there was dal and rice served as a dish at the local eatery.

Evano Oruvan: Straight from heart!

Truth is always bitter. And that's exactly what I felt when I came out of Chandran theater in udhayam complex in Chennai after watching "Evano Oruvan". The movie comes as a hard punch on all so called happy go lucky youth of India. How we manage to laugh at our problems. How we manage to escape from the basic problems without even thinking about whether what we are doing is just or not. Movie stars Madhavan in an excellent role ( one of his best according to me) as a typical middle class man. The magic of the movie is that his simplicity is maintained throughout the character. Not unlike other such social upheaval movies wherein the protagonist undergoes tremendous change in character and that's what makes these movies unrealistic. This is by far one of the most realistic movies on the social issues till now and the director has managed to maintain the same till the end. The situations where the hero reacts are all very subtle and very common situations and what pinches us hard is how did we manage to neglect all those till now. The climax and the scenes which lead to that are the best in the movie according to me . The movie works only and only because of its simplicity and straight from heart approach. As for the cons , I would say, it is a very slow movie , there is hardly any pace and no "masala" items. A pure classic cinema at its best! But all of us know it's fate. :)

Movie review of Manorama Six feet under

The trailers itself was enough for me to watch the movie. Very simple and next door characters and a weird but interesting title. So here I was in innovative multiplex watching this taut thriller with my friends. We were six of us and including us there were only 25 of us in the gold class :( .

Abhay Deal as Satyaveer Singh , a small town PWD officer and a flop novelist ( how many heroes would have accepted to play this character is another question which lingers in my mind) suspended for taking bribe for the first time. His wife played by Gul Panag is a typical middle class woman constantly bragging over her husband's joblessness and stuff. And their kid.
Enters Sarika , wife of the irrigation minister of the state asking Satyaveer to spy on her cheating husband and hence begins a treasure hunt for Satyaveer. The plot has enough twists and turns to keep the viewer at the edge of the seat. It has the intelligence to make the viewer think at the same time it is not a very complicated stuff. It was very difficult to find any logical flaws in the movie.

As far as the performance goes, Abhay comes around with non-designer clothes throughout the movie and pulls off a stellar of a performance. He plays the man next door with complete ease. Other actors all play their part brilliantly. Special mention must be made of Raima Sen. Music front, only a couple of songs which run in background in the movie which are hummable.

The only thing I found lacking in the movie was pace. I savor movies with this pace but not many ( which was evident from the fact that only 25 people were there on the 3rd day of the movie release). If only the screenplay had been more taut along with being flawless it would have been a better bet for the producers of the movie.

People who savor sensible and realistic movies.. Do not give this a miss.