Guest blogger: Andrew Selth, Research Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute and author of Populism, Politics and Propaganda: Burma and the Movies

Sylvester Stallone has claimed that his movie, Rambo 4, released internationally in February and available to Australians on DVD next month, has a serious purpose — to draw attention to the Burmese government’s long record of human rights abuses and to mobilize action against the military regime. Yet, its dubious entertainment value aside, this movie in fact has the potential to do Burma’s opposition movement considerable harm. 

When deciding where to set his movie, Stallone reportedly asked both the UN and Soldier of Fortune (SOF) magazine to name the world’s worst current war zones. SOF nominated the 60 year-old civil war between Burma’s central government and the ethnic Karens, most of who live along the Thai-Burma border. The cinematic result is an almost cosmic battle between good and evil, as the invincible US Special Forces soldier John Rambo once again comes out of retirement to rescue a group of Christian missionaries held captive by the Burmese army. As the movie’s tag line goes, ‘old heroes never die, they just reload’.

The brooding, disaffected anti-hero of First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part 2 (1985) and Rambo 3 (1988) is now in his 60s, and less prone to leaping about the landscape, but he can still mow down the bad guys with the best of them. According to the Internet Movie Database, the film averages 2.59 killings per minute. As one US reviewer has noted, the final body count of 236 dead in just 91 minutes makes it ‘possibly the most violent movie ever to get an R rating and a wide release in America’. More...

Good news. The ABC (that is, the Australian Broadcasting Corp) is screening Dr Strangelove on Saturday night. I know one bit of trivia about this film, which I'm not looking up to confirm, because if it's not true, I don't want to know. And it's this: the president in the movie, Merkin Muffley, is named in honour of Lyndon Johnson, who, when addressing the nation, would open with the standard presidential phrase, 'My fellow Americans'. Except in Texan, it came out as 'Mah fellah merkins'. Cute, eh?

I must say I've never found this film to be terribly funny — it's just too dark for that. But my, that script! That set! That Sellers!:

There's a respectable view that, for reasons of political correctness, Hollywood resists making movies in which radical Islamists are the enemy. So I was encouraged that in the opening of Iron Man, which I caught last night, the film unambiguously makes bad guys of the Taliban-like force which kidnaps the hero, Tony Stark. But the fact that these extremists turn out to be merely the dupes of an American arms manufacturer does rather play into conservative fears that Hollywood liberals are a self-loathing bunch who think the main enemy of world peace is America.

Not that this should distract from a thoroughly enjoyable film. I love watching A-actors in B-movies. Downey Jr is perfect, and Gwyneth Paltrow has not been this good since The Talented Mr Ripley. But a special mention to Jeff Bridges as the villain. He was so good I never even thought about The Dude.

Welcome back to International Policy Projector, our occasional series looking at international policy through movies and TV.

As the NY Times said in its review of this film, zombie movies have always been rich territory for metaphor. And although 28 Weeks Later doesn’t lay it on too thick, the early references to a London ’green zone’, where a small group of citizens is protected by a cordon of US troops, makes it pretty tempting to see this as an allegory for the Iraq occupation. More...

What's with the ridiculous sneering in The Age's review of this new film? It's as if the reviewer is accusing the film-makers of slandering the Taliban ('Naturally, upon arrival he stops off at a stadium to take in a public stoning — but when you want to paint your villains as truly barbaric, only intimations of gay child rape will do'). Does the reviewer consider it somehow impolitic or impolite to portray the depradations of that regime?

The NY Times reports that Barack Obama has a head of steam:

The campaign of Mr. Obama, which slogged uncertainly through a period in the late summer and fall, alarming contributors who feared that he might have missed his moment, is now brimming with confidence as he delivers a closing argument to Iowa voters. His speeches are noticeably crisper, his poise is more consistent and many supporters say they no longer must rely upon a leap of faith to envision him winning the nomination.

It so happens that just as we reach the final few weeks of campaigning before the early January Democratic primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, in our household we've been re-watching season 6 of The West Wing, which shows Democratic presidential candidate Matthew Santos (played by Jimmy Smits) and his campaign manager, Josh Lyman, going through the same political process. The coincidence is made all the more compelling by the parallels between Santos and Obama — they're both liberal Democrats, come from racial minorities, and are telegenic, articulate and self-deprecating.  More...

This is the first post in an occasional series I'm calling 'International Policy Projector', on how elements of international policy are portrayed on the cinema and television.

Michael Bay’s Transformers might seem an unusual subject for this sober blog. It is essentially an action film designed to sell toys to teenage boys. But considering how a similar film like Top Gun came to be seen as emblematic of Reaganite America and its foreign policy, Transformers is worth a closer look. More...