martharay-01256 Gorgeously filmed and aided by some excellent performances Peter Weir has made a great film in The Year of Living Dangerously. Mel Gibson plays a young Australian reporter stationed in Jakarta, Indonesia under the Sukarno regime. He befriends a dwarf Chinese- Australian named Billy Kwan and romances a Brit journalist Jill Bryant. The look of the film is good- It makes it seem almost akin to a documentary and there is a beautiful glow to each scene. All the actors are in top form- Gibson, Sigourney Weaver and especially Linda Hunt who plays the dwarf. This is a sweeping tale of morality, romance and political unrest. Another highlight is the score by the ever-reliable Vangelis.

joemccoy-72932 Peter Weir's The year of living dangerously is a fantastic film. A fictionalized story based on real world happenings it is drama and romance interwoven against a political backdrop. Both the leads Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver are stunning (in my opinion one of the best movie couples ever committed on film) and Linda Hunt is amazing as the male dwarf (she won an Oscar for her work here). Vangelis has provided a sublime soundtrack, and even by his lofty standards I hold it on a higher level than his other work. Of course the architect of the entire project- The director Peter Weir skillfully directs his actors in various locations around the Indonesian islands and this is a testimony of how underrated the man is(seriously where is his lifetime achievement?) . He has made poetry in motion here.

JohnHowardReid NOTES: Linda Hunt won the Best Supporting Actress Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Australian Film Institute, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, and the New York Film Critics. She also won the Australian Film Institute Jury Award. The movie also received nominations for AFI Awards in the following categories: Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Film Editing, Best Music Score, Best Costumes, Best Actor (Mel Gibson), and Best Sound. Negative cost: $6 million.MGM's claim that this movie was the first Australian film to be financed by a U.S. company is, of course, absolute rubbish. Rangle River (1936) was the first Oz movie to be financed entirely by a Hollywood company (Columbia), though U.S. companies did invest in previous Australian movies such as Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford (1915) starring Fred Niblo, and Venus of the South Seas (1924) starring Annette Kellerman. In the sound period, Universal invested in A Ticket in Tatts (1934) and at least six or seven other films during the 1930s. The important film in this decade, however, is the previously mentioned Rangle River (1936) which received an enormous amount of local publicity. During the 1940s only Smithy (1946) (Columbia) was wholly financed by Hollywood. In the following decades of the 1950s and 1960s, a number of Australian films were partly financed by Hollywood companies, but only ten were made with 100% Hollywood money: The Kangaroo Kid (1950) (Embassy), Kangaroo (1951) (20th Century-Fox), Long John Silver (1954) (Joseph Kaufman/20th Century-Fox), Smiley (1956) and its sequel, Smiley Gets a Gun (1958) (both 20th Century-Fox), On the Beach (1959) (Stanley Kramer/United Artists), Summer of the 17th Doll (1959) (Hecht-Hill- Lancaster/United Artists), The Sundowners (1960) (Warner Bros.), Port of Escape (1961) (John Calvert), Color Me Dead (1968) (Commonwealth United/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Of course a number of Oz movies of the 40s, 50s and 60s were wholly financed by British studios, but that is another story, though I should mention The Shiralee (1957), wholly financed by Ealing/MGM British! The moral of this survey is: Though always strong on hyperbole, MGM's publicity department was occasionally light on facts.COMMENT: Anyone expecting an atmospheric vision and pictorially imaginative exposition of South-East Asia is going to be a bit disappointed. True, there are some great scenes, but with one or two exceptions the pictorial richness of "Picnic at Hanging Rock" is missing and a lot of the time it is composer Maurice Jarre rather than the director (or the photographer) who is working hard to convey atmosphere and dramatic impact. Instead Weir has opted to concentrate a lot of his attention on his characters. Unfortunately they are not a particularly interesting lot. Perhaps with a different cast, something dramatic, something expressive of the tension and conflict expressed in some of the dialogue and situations might have come across despite the unhelpful hand of the director. But with players like Mel Gibson, Noel Ferrier, the dwarf, and even normally reliable people like Michael Murphy, the battle for our attention is lost. Because the characters are so uninteresting, the film seems much longer than it is and there is little drama and atmosphere despite the sometimes well-filled CinemaScope screen of milling crowds and agitated mobs.

slightlymad22 Continuing my plan to watch every Mel Gibson movie in order, I come toThe Year Of Living Dangerously (1982)Plot In A Paragraph: Guy Hamilton (Gibson) an Australian reporter, tries to navigate the political minefield of mid 1960's Indonesia during the reign of Presidant Surkarno. He is aided by photographer Billy Kwan, who introduces him to Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver) and the pair start an affair.After working with George Miller for a second time on Mad Max 2, Gibson re-teamed with Peter Weir, in this very under rated movie. It's a complex movie that sucks you in, and you really feel like you know the time and place, in fact you feel like you could be there. It's actually a lot more about people than anything that's politically happening, but that's what makes it so intriguing. The movie (and certainly the promotional work) plays to Gibsons looks and my DVD cover looks like the cover of a romance novel. But it also shows he can do dangerous and reckless (outside of Mad Max) very well too. I'm sure a lot of women lusted after Gibson after watching this. Gibson is well cast as the journalist addicted to risk taking, but Weavers character is pretty uninteresting as far as her usual roles go, but she is as solid as ever. Has she ever gave a bad performance?? But the movie belongs to the person playing Billy Kwan. The man Billy Kwan, is played by a woman! A New York stage actress called Linda Hunt, who is so brilliant, so that character, that it never occurs to us that she is not a man. This is what great acting is folks. The Year Of Living Dangerously grossed $10 million dollars at the domestic box office to finish they year 71st highest grossing movie of 1983.