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Sunday, November 04, 2007

AMC right now is showing THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER

Still an awesome movie. I saw this in the theater on my 16th birthday.

We just watched the scene where Captain Ramius (Sean Connery) and Borodin (Sam Neill) are in Ramius's cabin, talking about what they will do when they reach America. And Borodin is talking about how he will travel from state to state, with "no papers": in other words, the government won't be watching where he's going all the time.

Does anyone else find it horribly ironic that the country that Ramius and his crew are defecting from in a 1990 movie, is what the America they are defecting to is really becoming in 2007?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Chris! Fred Thompson was in Hunt for Red October! Does this count as free air time for a political candidate now that he's running for president???

Chris Knight said...

A VERY interesting question!

Last year, in the month leading up to the election, the Murphy in the Morning Show on 107.5 FM in Greensboro did a live interview with me about my first school board commercial (the "Death Star blowing up the schoolhouse" one). But it was really weird: because of the equal-time laws, they couldn't put my actual voice live on the air. If they had done that for me, they would have had to give every other candidate an equal amount of airtime also. So Jack Murphy asked the questions and one of his cohorts relayed the question to me on the phone, and then I gave him my answer and he repeated *that* on live radio. Yeah it was a pretty weird way to do an interview, but I completely understood why they had to do it that way.

So far as Fred Thompson being in a broadcast of The Hunt for Red October, now that he's a declared candidate for President: I really don't see a problem with it. Because his appearance in that movie wasn't a campaign appearance at all. He was just an actor playing a role. Same holds true for his later appearances on the Law & Order TV show.

(Say what one might of why Fred Thompson would not be a good President, I *do* think that he is a very fine actor. The man has a lot of presence and talent there, and he should be respected and admired for that. It's what he would bring to the table as an actual President that I have problems with.)

So for this next year, whether it's The Hunt for Red October or Die Hard 2 or Law & Order, no I don't think they count as "free airtime" for Fred Thompson the candidate at all. I like to believe that plenty enough Americans won't be persuaded by *that* much, anyway. If they are, then there are considerably bigger problems in this country than whether or not AMC runs a movie with Fred Thompson.