Word: weir
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...employees, or technically their ESOP, will take over the Weirton operation for $66 million, plus $300 million mostly for inventories of coal, iron ore and unsold products. For their money, the workers are getting an old plant, built during the early part of the century by Steel Pioneer E.T. Weir, but one that has been modernized over the years; its cold rolling mill numbers among the industry's newest. The plan calls for all workers to own shares of the new company's stock, but details of how much each will get have not been worked out. None...
There is something larger at play here, behind the emotionally gripping collage of inner-city Asian slums, spellbinding rural rice-paddies, and the unfolding violence of the communist coup. Weir also seems to be grappling with the essential human misery of the vast majority of Asia, indeed of mankind--not a new theme, to be sure, but one rarely addressed honestly by filmmakers. Even when directors treat elemental human problems--hunger, disease, poverty--they usually depict them as an incidental sideshow to the more natural cinematic book of political machinations. Misery becomes a political cliche, a problem to be solved...
...Year of Living Dangerously makes no such claims, and therein lies its appeal. Weir's film doesn't provide all the answers. It only throws these problems out on the table, as if attempting to scratch somewhere beyond the too-easy conflicts of the political arena. The result is crude, very unpolished, but in its own way perhaps the most honest piece of work one can expect from Hollywood on the immense human problems of the Third World...
...PROBLEM is that Weir's scattershot, almost stream-of-consciousness approach makes this theme almost impossible to unearth With a plot that gets steadily more indecipherable. Weir becomes incoherent with the gravity of his many messages. The signals are confusing from the start. When Guy Hamilton, a rough, unschooled foreign correspondent from Australia, arrives in Jakarta to make himself a name, it looks like we're in for a simple adventure romance. Having decided to put on some decent clothes since his appearance last summer in "Road Warrior," Mel Gibson looks and plays perfectly the stereotypical cub reporter--cheeky, brash...
...backdrop to the parade of violent--but apparently unconnected--images that flash before our eyes. Is it by government or men that human misery will be cured? As the film ends, it seems that even the most masterful of politicians, a man like Sukarno, is a failure. Weir has no particular ideological axe to grind, but seems to be implying--and one can never be sure about this irritatingly obtuse work--that governments are impotent in the face of the most elemental, human problems. It doesn't make for much Hollywood excitement, but if Peter Weir is right, then...