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               The Year Of Living Dangerously (Peter Weir, 1982)
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Mel Gibson stars in this period political thriller directed by Peter Weir. Set 
in Indonesia during the 1965 coup against President Sukarno, the film stars 
Gibson as Guy Hamilton, an Australian wire-service reporter covering the scene. 
Whenever Hamilton becomes too glib or indifferent for his own good, he is 
brought back to earth by his "conscience," photographer Billy Kwan (played in 
male drag by diminutive actress Linda Hunt, who won an Academy Award for her 
performance). As all of Jakarta sinks into disarray, Hamilton pursues a romance 
with British attaché Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver). Filmed on location in the 
Philippines and Australia, the film was financed by MGM, in the first such 
American-Australian financial collaboration.


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Type..................: Movie
Container file........: MKV
Audio Languages.......: English 1.0 (Untouched)
Subtitles Ripped......: English, Spanish
Subtitles in Subpack..: English, French, Spanish
Aspect Ratio..........: 2.35:1
Original Aspect Ratio.: 2.35:1
Color.................: Color
Source................: NTSC ANAMORPHIC DVD
Genre.................: Drama, War
IMDb Rating...........: 7.0
Movie Information.....: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086617/

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REVIEW BY ROGER EBERT / June 1, 1983

"The Year of Living Dangerously" achieves one of the best re-creations of an 
exotic locale I've ever seen in a movie. It takes us to Indonesia in the middle 
1960s, a time when the Sukarno regime was shaky and the war in Vietnam was just 
heating up. It moves us into the life of a foreign correspondent, a radio 
reporter from Australia who has just arrived in Jakarta, and who thrives in an 
atmosphere heady with danger. How is this atmosphere created by Peter Weir, the 
director? He plunges into it headfirst. He doesn't pause for travelogue shots. 
He thrusts us immediately into the middle of the action--into a community of 
expatriates, journalists, and embassy people who hang out in the same bars, 
restaurants, and clubs, and speculate hungrily on the possibility that Sukarno 
might be deposed. That would be a really big story, a corrective for their vague 
feelings of being stuck in a backwater.

Guy Hamilton, the journalist (Mel Gibson), is a lanky, Kennedyesque, chain-
smoking young man who has a fix on excitement. He doesn't know the ropes in 
Indonesia, but he learns them quickly enough, from a dwarfish character named 
Billy Kwan.

Billy is half-Oriental and half-European, and knows everybody and can tell you 
where all the bodies are buried. He has a warm smile and a way of encouraging 
you to do your best, and if you sometimes suspect he has unorthodox political 
connections -- well, he hasn't crossed you yet. In all the diplomatic receptions 
he's a familiar sight in his gaudy tropical shirts.

"The Year of Living Dangerously" follows Guy and Billy as they become friends, 
and something more than friends; they begin to share a common humanity and 
respect. Billy gets Guy a good interview with the local Communist Party chief. 
He even introduces Guy to Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), a British attaché with 
two weeks left on her tour. As the revolution creeps closer, as the stories get 
bigger, Guy and Jill become lovers and Billy, who once proposed to Jill, begins 
to feel pushed aside.

This sounds, no doubt, like a foreign correspondent plot from the 1940s. It is 
not. "The Year of Living Dangerously" is a wonderfully complex film about 
personalities more than events, and we really share the feeling of living in 
that place, at that time. It does for Indonesia what Bogdanovich's "Saint Jack" 
did for Singapore. The direction is masterful; Weir (whose credits include 
"Picnic at Hanging Rock") is as good with quiet little scenes (like Billy's 
visit to a dying child) as big, violent ones (like a thrilling attempt by Guy 
and Billy to film a riot).

The performances of the movie are a good fit with Weir's direction, and his 
casting of the Billy Kwan character is a key to how the film works. Billy, so 
small and mercurial, likable and complicated and exotic, makes Indonesia seem 
more foreign and intriguing than any number of standard travelogue shots 
possibly could. That means that when the travelogue shots do come (and they do, 
breathtakingly, when Gibson makes a trip into the countryside), they're not just 
scenery; they do their work for the film because Weir has so convincingly placed 
us in Indonesia.

Billy Kwan is played, astonishingly, by a woman -- Linda Hunt, a New York stage 
actress who enters the role so fully that it never occurs to us that she is not 
a man. This is what great acting is, a magical transformation of one person into 
another. Mel Gibson (of "The Road Warrior") is just right as a basically 
conventional guy with an obsessive streak of risk-taking. Sigourney Weaver has a 
less interesting role but is always an interesting actress. This is a 
wonderfully absorbing film. 

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                             MEDIAINFO REPORT
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General
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Title                            : The Year of Living Dangerosly
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