The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)

Summary: Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson) arrives in Jakarta on his first foreign correspondent post with ABS in 1959. The country is on the brink of civil war. He meets a Chinese cinematographer, Billy Kwan (Linda Hunt), who introduces him to the assistant to the British military attache, Jilly (Sigourney Weaver). As Billy engineers a romance between Guy and Jilly, the country crumbles, and death becomes an eminent possibility for all of them.

Listen, I may have gotten some of that world history stuff up there wrong. If there I is one thing I am not, it's a world history buff. Deal.

Let's talk about what a stupid lie the title is. They don't live dangerously for anything approaching a year. The movie seems to take about a year to watch, but the people in it only live dangerously for a whopping three weeks. Oooo! Tough!

And, to be honest, they don't live all that dangerously until the last three days or so. Again, what is the meaning of this? When you live that dangerously, it takes a year off your life? Girl, please. I live more dangerously than that when I forget to look both ways crossing the street.

As for the central romance, it doesn't start until two-thirds of the way into the movie, and it never really gets off the ground after that. And then suddenly crazy Billy's narration, whose creepiness only increased by just now learning that it was a woman in drag the whole damn time, is blathering on about Guy's "addiction to risk" and how he's going to lose Jilly by putting his career ahead of her. Again, girl, please. He's addicted to risk after three weeks? Two of which were boring and uneventful? My eye. The only one addicted to anything was Billy to his/her overwrought and unnecessary narration. By the time Billy was freaking out and going all The Shining on his/her typewriter, I was kind of hoping the rebels would round at least one of them up and shoot them.

Someone, after all, needed to put these people out of their misery. It's nice to have a fling when you are leaving the country, but must you be so dramatic about it? D