If you’re a fan of landscaping, topiary and lush gardens of flowers, shrubs and trees, each of which has one of those little name placards posted near it, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is your place, friend.
I was there for the first time today for the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. It is a marvel to walk under richly scented canopies of cherry trees in full bloom, showers of petals catching on the wind and cascading around you, like you’re in a commercial for a feminine hygiene product. There were many people there: frisky young couples rolling around on the grass, families with rambunctious kids in tow, burnouts kicking about a hacky-sack, old people moving slowly, amateur photographers aplenty and a handful of geishas. It was beautiful, but I can only take so much mingling with nature. All those blossoms started to look the same and I could feel my body flooding with histamine. Not even the lazy, sun-dappled landscape could whisk my mind too far away from the crowds and the fact that the garden seems to be located directly in a flightpath of JFK.
I decided I wasn’t taking the long haul to Brooklyn without making something else of my trip, so I stopped by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Cinemas to see Friends with Money.
Like director Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking and Lovely & Amazing, it concerns relationships and talking about relationships, this time around with a middle-aged-woman flavor, meditations on aging gracefully, and the help and hindrance money can bring.
Jennifer Aniston costars as the one poor friend who’s a housemaid, obsessive over her ex-boyfriend and Lancôme skin cream samples; she’s not bad although she seems to reprise her role from The Good Girl. Otherwise, it’s a fine leading cast, with Catherine Keener as a screenwriter whose husband ignores her, Frances McDormand as an angry, angry woman who argues fiercely with people who cut in front of her in lines and steal her parking spaces, and Joan Cusack as the most-moneyed friend who’s somewhat shallow and only slowly realizes she doesn’t actually do anything.