The Cinemark Tanforan

As stolen from the bit on Sausage Party, the Cinemark Tanforan is 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.