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I have spent many pleasant hours mocking "How To Make An American Quilt" to friends, but at this moment I want to play fair. I'm sure that there are many things to like about this movie and that somehow they escaped my notice. For me it was never more than a series of plot devices stitched together (ha ha) to form an unsatisfying story.

Winona Ryder is always a pleasure to watch. I've liked her better in more irreverent titles like "Beetlejuice" or "Heathers". Still, she wears earnestness well, and manages to make bearable the Poloniusesque quilt speech at end of the picture (see the quotes section).

The supporting players should be every bit as watchable (with several centuries of acting experience among them, they ought to be). I wish I'd been allowed to watch them act. Their function was to sit in front of the camera quilting and say a few words of introduction before the flashback--as if they were hosts of a documentary.

I want to pause for a moment over Maya Angelou's casting. It's always a tricky thing introducing a famous person from another discipline as an actor. I call it the "Hey, you're Kareem Abdul-Jabbar" problem (based on the scene from _Airplane_ where a kid recognizes the basketball player in the co-pilot's seat. The joke is in how much time he spends denying it). Maya Angelou has screen presence, but does nothing to dispel the problem. My dominant experience watching her was, "Wow, they got Maya Angelou, world famous poet!" Maybe this was the idea. Maybe the filmmakers felt her famous presence would, in itself, add depth to the proceedings, so why muddy it with anything as messy as an interesting character? Her appearance was less acting than promotion. Maya Angelou wouldn't appear in a dog, would she?

Well...

The plot reminds me of a line Robin Williams had about alcoholics, "You realize you're and alcoholic when you repeat yourself. You realize you're an alcoholic when you repeat yourself. You realize, oh dammit." Each woman's story follows a similar pattern. Girl meets boy, sleeps with boy, marries boy, boy leaves, boy comes back--each time unconvincingly (I wonder how far any guy has ever gotten with the opening line "You swim like a mermaid"). The Alfre Woodard story is the only variation, and as a result, the only interesting one among them.

And of course Winona Ryder's Finn has a similar problem. Does she marry Dermott Mulrooney or does she go off with the local stud muffin. I call him the local stud muffin because that's all he is. The actor who played him didn't convince me that there was anything under the perfect I-don't-have-to-work-out abs that would compel her to do more than roll in the field with him. He wasn't a character so much a plot device meant to set up an obvious choice. Handsome rogue or dependable architecht? Given the way the flashbacks ran, take a guess.

There are more scenes to pummel here. There's the thesis blowing away in the wind (she's the only grad student I've ever seen with no notes, no paperweight, and, since she was using a typewriter, no carbons), and there's her random meeting with the Stud Muffin (who just happened to be hanging out in the groves with a picnic basket and a blanket for her. I guess this was set before the advent of stalking laws), but it would take too long to mock them all. The real trouble with the movie is that it was so earnest, so desperate to convince the audience of its poetic depths, that it wound up shallow, unsatisfying, unconvincing and unintentionally funny.

Or, to put it another way--never have so many, who were so talented, worked on something so ordinary.

Eddie Murphy gave the best indictment of the Amityville series' believability when, imitating the new owner of the house, he said, "Oh baby, this place is beautiful. There are trees here and dogs and its a beautiful neighborhood and..."

"Demon: Get out!"

"Too bad we can't stay baby."

Again, in this movie, all of the family's problems would be solved if they did one simple thing. Leave!!! Just leave the house. That's always been my policy when my dead relatives come through the closet and giant mice run under my bed. It's time to go! Why does it take these people so long to figure that out?

Even if they don't want to leave the house, why don't they just destroy the doll house? One sledge hammer blow and all their problems are over.

This is a movie that is so bad that you will call friends to tell them it's on just so they can be in on the badness. The real horror is that they keep making dreck like this, keep employing no-talent actors and writers, and waste valuable plastic that could go into useful items like dildos and replacement parts for George W. Bush's head.

Maybe its because I'm hard to scare, but "Rosemary's Baby" didn't work well for me. I thought the urban paranoia was interesting and sometimes effective, but because I knew the Satanists' entire plan of action within the first five minutes of the movie, the suspense was spoiled (I won't kill the final discoveries for you. That wouldn't be fair. Just know that if you're experienced in these sorts of stories you'll have figured it out _way_ before Mia Farrow does).

Movies like these depend on holding one crucial piece of information out of reach so that you'll figure it out at exactly the same time the character does. If you get it too early, you spend too much time saying, "No, dummy, it's over there!", which makes me feel more frustrated than scared.

So, while it wasn't a bad movie and kept my interest (and Ruth Goldman was amusingly dotty as the neighbor) it didn't scare me.