Penelope Cruz at the Garden Cinema

Penelope Cruz at the Garden Cinema

  A couple of weeks ago I went to The Garden Cinema to talk to them about Almodóvar and Penelope Cruz for the cycle of Cruz films they’ll be screening soon. The discussion is a bit chaotic, like all good conversation tends to be, but Abla Kandalaft elegantly puts the reins on when needed. I make one error that I caught when I listened, and that is when I refer to the plot of Bigas Luna’s Golden…

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THE SECRET GARDEN (1993)

Dir.  Agnieszka Holland

"It's what I should always have done—I shouldn't have become involved in cinema, that's for fools. Gardening is central because in gardening one is entering into another time into eternals and returns and cycles. Those are the ressurection cycles in my life."

—Derek Jarman, 1991

Zuzana Šulajová in Záhrada / The Garden (1995) dir. by Martin Šulík.

Films watched in 2023.

Top 10 June.

Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, 2022)

Burden of Dreams (Les Blank, 1982)

Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989)

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022)

Day of the Outlaw (André De Toth, 1959)

Master Gardener (Paul Schrader, 2022)

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (Kelly Fremon Craig, 2023)

Ohikkoshi (a.k.a. Moving) (Shinji Sômai, 1993)

The Kid (Charlie Chaplin, 1921)

(My list on Letterboxd -click here-)

seated for challengers!!!

THE GARDEN (1990) dir. Derek Jarman A nearly wordless visual narrative intercuts two main stories and a couple of minor ones. A woman, perhaps the Madonna, brings forth her baby to a crowd of intrusive paparazzi; she tries to flee them. Two men who are lovers marry and are arrested by the powers that be. The men are mocked and pilloried, tarred, feathered, and beaten. Loose in this contemporary world of electrical-power transmission lines is also Jesus. The elements, particularly fire and water, content with political power, which is intolerant and murderous. (link in title)

Derek Jarman, January 31, 1942 – February 19, 1994.

Rosamund Pike as Elspeth Catton in SALTBURN (2023)

Les Onze Mille Verges (1975)

“Why does everybody think I’m so wild? I’m not wild. I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path.” Cookie Mueller

"Cookie looked like Janis Joplin-meets-Jayne Mansfield, a redneck hippie with a little bit of glamour drag thrown in. She never led a safe life, unsafe was her middle name. She lived on the edge, always." John Waters

Born on this day 75 years ago: vivacious bad girl, writer, go-go dancer, advice columnist, art critic, drug dealer, globe-trotter and avant-garde New York scene-maker Cookie Mueller (née Dorothy Karen Mueller, 2 March 1949 – 10 November 1989). She’s a fiercely charismatic presence in early John Waters "gutter films" like Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). Her close confidante, photographer Nan Goldin would describe Mueller as “the most fabulous woman I’d ever seen ... She was the starlet of the Lower East Side: a poetess, a short-story writer, she starred in John Waters’ early movies. She was sort of the queen of the whole downtown social scene.” (Unsurprisingly, Goldin has an eye for vivid detail. In the wrenching 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, she recalls that the first time she met Cookie in Provincetown in the 1970s, Mueller was wearing vintage Springolator heels held together with safety pins!). I highly recommend investigating Mueller’s wry and elegant autobiographical musings like Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black or Garden of Ashes (recently reissued) – or Chloe Griffin’s excellent 2014 biography Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller. Pictured: portrait of Mueller by Bob Berg.

Vadim Muntagirov and Marianela Nunez performing Cinderella’s act II pas de eux (Royal Ballet 2023)

Master Gardener (2022)

Dir. Paul Schrader

Language: English

Slávnosť v botanickej záhrade / Celebration in the Botanical Garden (1969) dir. by Elo Havetta.

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