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Reviews
The Four Corners of Nowhere (1995)
Eric Vesbit once saved me from a flaming bus. I appreciate that.
At its core, Four Corners is a sweet story about artistic pretension, personal fulfillment, and love, in that order. The characters, all college-age and located in college-town Ann Arbor, Michigan, are, at first glance, stereotypes and exaggerations of the students and hangers-on typically found in such burgs. Uniformly white and well-heeled, they read too much Dostoyevsky, worry about the tribulations of the American Indian, and smoke a lot of weed. They cull angst where there need not be any and do a hell of a lot of kvetching.
In other words, they're all the worst sort of people alive. However, writer/director Steve Chbosky is aware of this, and he does a great job of finding the human beings buried beneath these stereotypes and, slowly but surely, bringing them to the surface as the story progresses, having fun with the stereotypes all the while. As the disparate stories of the principal characters arc and come together through the action or inaction of the secondary (read: functional) characters, the movie's tongue falls quickly out of its cheek and it finds a real voice and message in its conclusion.
Although I personally have little sympathy for the faux-problems of silver spoon rich kids like the ones in this movie, Chbosky and the excellent cast do a great job of raising them from the deadness of stereotypicality, and, when all was said & done, I walked away from the movie a little bit happier than when I'd started it.