Weirdly lost the notes to Sausage Party. I remember writing something down but it turns out I yelled it into my phone whilst driving on El Camino Real. I could retrieve it now, but I’m in a café. I could listen to it through the headphones that I use to drown out trailers, but I’m listening to Culturecide to make the typing go fast.

You see the problem.

Movie fine, though thinks that swearing a lot is the equivalent of comedy. Opening song: ‘We certainly not going to die in any horrible way’ is certainly an example of how being on the nose without actually thinking through to the joke is not an actual joke. Unlike perversely run-on sentences. Or self-referentiality.

Probably should talk about snacks, but really missing the scanner. Though seeing some concrete from a fancy cottage will be historical in some way.

It does, however, develop into some kind of comedy when they fucking well shut up. There is a beautiful and funny horror film in there, when the living food items are eaten alive. Not so much talking either when they finish with a, I’m sorry to say, awe-inspiring, CGI food orgy.

A second appeal: the message. Basically fucking is better than war. I’m all for it. Until the victims get revenge and kill all the humans. Hey, I’m for that too.

The aspect of thinking that they’re hysterically funny just by talking, however, could use some re-examination. Like Anomalisa, Sausage Party is a great short film. Just a shorter one, only about two minutes, with the rest being a certain tolerability brought down by self-satisfaction.

But that is not our story. No, our story is the tale of the Cinemark Tanforan, the most awesome-ist theater in the history of po-post-modernism. First of all, look at it. LOOK AT IT!

That’s a cinema. It’s a massive featureless cinder block square sitting atop a parking structure.

This is the future. Well, it’s our future anyway, and I can’t wait!

But there’s more! How could there not be? Being unfamiliar, and late, I went to find chocolate. No luck, and settled with the bland but certainly better than Baskin-Robbins Dreyer’s ice-cream. But we’re nowhere near that point.

So I parked, thinking I was smart, away from the structure, which I believed was either going to charge me or eat me. I approached, panicked, but found these easy to follow directions.

I chose Cinema, and was lucky I did, because I discovered what remains the most baffling feature of any building I’ve ever seen. It is a staircase to suspended platform

that in no way goes to a cinema. It does, however, lead around the giant Ballardian concrete cube of death to…another staircase.

At this point, I took the other staircase, and entered the parking garage. It turned out it would have been free to park. It also turned out there were, I repeat no indications as to the location of the cinema, or even that a cinema existed. At this point, I had the foresight enough to document:

See a sign? For anything? I chose the elevators and chose wisely, though found no indications inside the elevator either. There was, however, a button marked ‘C’.

I pressed it, and not only arrived, but found myself in the lobby itself.

An elevator that opens right into the lobby. It’s brilliant! If one does not consider that I had in fact bypassed the box office entirely, and had to backtrack just to buy the tickets. But I had killed the requisite time to miss the trailers to whatever it is I’m going to see in France in six months, and was in a very positive state to see the film. Which was so-so.

I mentioned that.

But who cares? I love the Cinemark Tanforan! Though honestly, now I know where everything is maybe… No, screw it, I’m going back. Right after I took the picture at the top, a plane flew over the building, just something you’d see in a first director’s film! I’m waiting all day and taking that picture. And never making a second film.