Word: quilts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...usually a men-only province, was commandeered by a phalanx of women: teen dream Alicia Silverstone (Clueless), lonely heartthrob Sandra Bullock (While You Were Sleeping and The Net), ex-Marine schoolteacher Michelle Pfeiffer (Dangerous Minds) and a feminist princess named Pocahontas. Right now, with How to Make an American Quilt, Now and Then and Home for the Holidays, the plexes are awash in sisterhood cinema. And male moviegoers aren't just staying home wishing Monday Night Football were on seven times a week. They are going to the mall to see whether these women's films just might have something...
...women's films are taking baby steps toward cinematic maturity. And they may get there faster than the guy movies do. Hear Sarah Pillsbury, co-producer with Midge Sanford of American Quilt, on action movies: "They aren't familiar. They're f---in' identical! How many of these Assassins and Die Hards can we see? There is a saturation...
Agreed. Now let the women who have seized some share of power get to it: making a quilt of distinctive movies. It could be the finest legacy for future moviegoers, sons and daughters alike...
That's pretty much the message of How to Make an American Quilt, as received by Finn (Winona Ryder), a graduate student who spends a small-town summer with her grandmother and aunt (Ellen Burstyn and Anne Bancroft), working on her thesis and getting her head together. As things work out, she seems to devote most of her time to gathering instructive reminiscences from them and the rest of the ladies in their quilting bee. They are neither so genteel nor stridently feminist as you might fear...
There's something abrupt about the way these ladies are brought forward one by one to tell their often archetypal tales of dreams betrayed. But there's also a nice tartness, a lack of self-pity, in their telling. Quilt is a patchwork, but when it's finally stitched together, one sees a certain artless intricacy in its design, a certain glow in its blend of colors...