Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #161: The Year of Living Dangerously

Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) is a very well made look at how reporters, back when they still had stable careers, operate in unstable countries. It looks at ethical questions, from the point of view of both the journalists covering the conflicts, and the people who actually live in the country and have to live with the impact of their coverage. One of these people is a photographer played by an award-winning Linda Hunt. Unfortunately, the other major role is played by Mel Gibson, a name now synonymous with controversy, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from seeing the movie.

Between Christmas and the start of 2022 like many people I was stuck indoors with a lot of time to kill so I caught up on a few shows and movies. I can’t say I was itching to complete my viewing of Mel Gibson’s filmography, but I was pleasantly surprised to see Linda Hunt have such a prominent role. Certain TV viewers might know her as the boss on NCIS LA, but here we see her early in her career in a much more dramatic role. It’s an impressive performance, especially given that she is convincingly playing a man.

The movie is set in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1965 when there was high tension between communist and religious factions. Caught between those factions is a population living way below the poverty line and hoping for positive change. The situation draws international journalists such as Australian Guy Hamilton (Gibson) who is young with dreams of making a difference. His one contact in the city, local cameraman Billi Kwan (Hunt), proves to be a wealth of information on both the country’s culture and its politicians.

Kwan is also the story’s narrator, which makes narrative sense given how he seems to know everyone important in the city. Guy wonders if Billy is a spy, but maybe Billy is just a very good people person. It also helps people constantly underestimate him because of his short stature. Many of the other international journalists look down on him, both figuratively and literally, until he helps Guy score a major interview with a high-ranking member of the communist party. They make quite the team, covering riots while Guy comments on the situation in his microphone and Billy shoots with his camera at their own peril.

The rest of the international journalists and other diplomats/spies are an interesting lot. While the country is on the brink of conflict, many of these foreigners treat the situation almost like a vacation. Guy meets a British colonel (Bill Kerr) who is enjoying a sunny day by the pool but complains to a waiter that his drink doesn’t have enough ice. One reporter throws a party when he can finally afford a bungalow in the country. Another is happy to spend his leisure time chasing prostitutes who hang around a cemetery after dark, as long as he has access to penicillin.

Billy hopes Guy is different and is in a way grooming him to be a journalist that could help bring the country’s much needed change. The problem is the more success Guy gets, the more of a blind side he develops when it comes to ethics. Thanks to his romantic relationship with British embassy assistant Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver) he learns information that could shift the country’s political stability. Jill told him about the news in confidence so he could take precautions. Guy’s first instinct is to find proof of this information and tell the world, regardless of the impact on his relationship with Jill or on the local populace.

It is an interesting ethical dilemma. If this information is big news, is it Guy’s first priority to publish it, consequences be damned? However, if the news was told to him in confidence should he not mind his own business and wait for events to unfold? These are complicated questions, and if Guy was less self-centered, he would be asking them to Billy since he is in the best position to know what impact any information will have on his country.

Telling the story from Guy’s point of view makes sense given that like most of the audience he is a fish out of the water in this setting and historical context. However, the story could have been better if there had been less focus on Guy and his melodramatic romance, and more on the ordinary people of Jakarta. I never quite got the whole grasp of the conflict; despite the fact it is Guy’s job to tell me. The Year of Living Dangerously is worth watching, especially for Linda Hunt, but there is a better movie to be made about that historical period.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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