How To Make an Irritating Movie

When my wife brought home a copy of How to Make an American Quilt last night, I told her that I had never seen the movie. About halfway through watching it, I realized that I had, but that I had been so turned off by the movie that I forgot about it.

The Writing Makes the Movie

The main character in this movie is a graduate student who is trying to write her thesis but can't make up her mind about what to write about. It seems that the screenwriter had the same problem. The film wanders from story to story without ever really finding a theme more concrete than Love Is Hard, Love Sucks, Ain't Love Grand?. My guess is that the writer would justify her script's fragmented quality by comparing it to a quilt. Well, if this movie is a quilt it's a crazy quilt, with no real sense to it.

Keep it Simple, But Not TOO Simple!

I admire the fact that the writer tried to make many of the characters neither good nor bad, but ambiguous. At least this movie avoids the easy path of absolute love and absolute hate. Nonetheless, the characters remain simple, with obvious motivations that are meant to be poetic but end up being just plain boring.

For example, there's the young woman who likes swimming and her geologist boyfriend. He explains to her that he really enjoys studying rocks at the edges of bodies of water because the water forms the rocks into interesting shapes. Get it? She's a swimmer and he's a rock hound, see, and... Yawn.

There's just too muck kismet in this movie. Characters meet and speak their minds right away. After five seconds of small talk, one asks the other to get married and the other says yes. Such stories are charming when told by grandparents with memories melted by the passage of decades, but when seen played baldly on the screen they lack credibility.

Oh, Very Young

Now, I'm not exactly an old man yet, but I've been around a bit and I've seen couples come and go in and out of love. I know enough to tell what's genuine and what comes out of the romantic mind of a sophomoric student. Well, How To Make an American Quilt just isn't for real. Thirteen-year-olds may love its sentimentality, but adults will know that it was created by a mind who has not yet seen the full spectrum of love and life.