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The Year of Living Dangerously Customer Reviews (4 - 6 of 27 Reviews)

A love affair in Indonesia
The movie takes us back to Jakarta year 1965, where a group of international journalists is covering the political problems of Indonesia with a government on the verge of collapsing.

An Australian correspondent (Guy) allies with a half Indonesian-Australian photojournalist named Billy who knows the culture extremely well fishing for the great story.
In the meantime, Guy gets introduced to a beautiful lady working inside the British Embassy. Passion and romance begins between the two in an atmosphere full of political unrest and constant danger.
Beautiful sceneries of the real culture of Insdonesia mixed with a strange love affair between the two main characters in this movie.
If you wish to spend 2 relaxing hours, where love and action are involved in a very nice country, The year of living Dangerously falls very well in that category.

Similar good movies:
Havana
Saigon
The Bridges of Madison County



Bad Writing
This movie has the best scenery, directing, acting, and color of any movie I have ever seen. However, the script was poorly written.
According to the book "Inside The CIA" our guys in Indonesia finished off a half million suspected leftists and the movie does do justice to the brutality of our actions. However, our attrocities against the people of Indonesia are so far buried with sub-plots one might not know we were ever there.
The writers try to take on too much- hunger, Chinese plans for a coup, and the extreme right- all at once.
Its hard enough not mixing up Sukarno and Sukharto. How many poeple recognized the PLA as People's Liberation Army? One reviewer didnt even correctly spell Jakarta.

Classic
...like Casablance, you can put this baby on while flossing and getting ready for work, since its moral seriousness gives it eight legs or more.

It should be noted that along with Gallipoli, TYOLD was part of an Australian-cultural response to widespread suspicion of US involvement in the 1975 removal of the popular and charismatic Gough Whitlam from Australia's Prime Minstership, in which archaic constitutional procedures were used to remove Whitlam on royal authority alone...apparently and to this day because of his redistributionist policies and his refusal to cooperate with US foreign policy, after Australia's experience as a US ally in Vietnam.

Gallipoli showed how Colonial troops, whether white or "black" as in the case of Sikhs and Gurkhas, were thought of by the British (including the overrated Churchill) as cannon fodder and military lab rats.

The Year of Living Dangerously has an extremely unflattering picture of an American journalist, Pete Conrad, a careerist animal whose idea of a good time is buying sex in a graveyard because with "real" women he's a dud.

As such, at its release in 1981, Weir expressed a willingness to separate Oz film from the Hollywood machine. Revenge appeared in the mid-1980s with the rise of Paul Hogan, a no-talent who made farcical films about a "Crocodile Dundee" who the audience was called upon to admire...in Fascist scenes including one in which the Croc walks on top of people's heads in the subway.

Weir's genius in The Year was that he was able to show real people motivated as such by something more than greed and fear, the usual motivators of people in Hollywood product. In Casablanca transcendance is reserved to the end by the Hollywood law that the lead "cool" character has to stay hard-boiled (which is to say wounded by exchange relations) until the last possible minute, although Film Noir product such as Out of the Past played with this rule.

Here, however, Billy Kwan, disturbingly for a patriarchal/adolescent played by a woman, is a presence from the beginning of the film whose function is at first to annoy Pete Conrad.

Paul Hogan, in fact, nearly identified Gallipoli and Weir when in a mid-nineties Playboy interview Paul Hogan, in the manner of the pseudo-alpha star, spoke with false authority about mass motivation, saying that Australian men liked World War One a whole bunch, because they got to ride horses and fight other mobs.

Hogan was a buffoon and Gallipoli created a quiet revolution in the travel industry as thousands of grandchildren of the Australian men slaughtered to no purpose at Gallipoli booked passage to Istanbul.

As to another reviewer's white guilt, I hope the fashion returns. Bung Sukarno was an imperfect man as the film makes all too clear, but so was Winston bloody Churchill, and Westerners love to make apologies for flawed leaders up until, and beyond, the point at which the special prosecutor serves the leader with a writ, while holding leaders of the developing world to a Ghandian standard which even the Mahatma did not necessarily meet.

As a result of Western hysteria over the "loss" of a canal which should be a common waterway in the first place, the fashion became blame the victim with the result that today, vast stretches of the developing world, especially but not only Central America, are new wastelands. Sukarno had no friends in 1965 because he told truth to power and refused to give the US cozy access to oil and support in Vietnam, and was as a result overthrown in a bloodbath by the Moslem generals.

Meanwhile, the US was enjoying its fat years. A modicum of guilt would have prevented the return of colonialism as deadly farce, and as seen today in Iraq.

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