Talk Radio (1988)

Why so much hype?

Good movie but grossly overrated

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The movie is still so topical, even if it was out in 1988. It is filled with arguments from people who call themselves far right or far left. We get mixed up, hateful and frustrated callers. Everything is there. It is not premonitory, but we are now back in this atmosphere of mistrust towards all.It's little like Facebook but on the radio.In any case, that led me to several thoughts. It does not stop. A social criticism still on the spot, especially nowadays.In addition, the main actor, Eric Bogosian, is the same who wrote the play and the film, he is excellent and realistic in portraying a loud, talk radio personality.

Barry Champlain (Eric Bogosian) is a hard-talking Jewish radio late-night show host in Dallas. Laura (Leslie Hope) is his latest young producer and sex partner. Stu (John C. McGinley) is his long-time call screener. It's Friday night. His boss Dan (Alec Baldwin) has just negotiated a nation-wide deal with Metro Wave. Their representative Dietz (John Pankow) is observing his show. With the new pressures, Barry begs his ex-wife Ellen (Ellen Greene) to help him. She was there from the very start when he was just a slick-talking suit salesman and she arrives for his big Monday night debut. It's a nightly onslaught of racist Chet, dim-witted Debbie, druggie Kent (Michael Wincott) who claims his girlfriend has OD, and many many others.This is an intense hard-talking thriller from Oliver Stone. Bogosian's performance is something special. The verbal gymnastic is incredible. It's the wonderful cesspool of human fears and loathing.

Sandwiched between his Oscar-winning films WALL STREET and BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, Oliver Stone brilliantly blends co-writer/actor Eric Bogosian's original stage play with the real life murder of Denver radio show host Alan Berg in what is often called his most underrated film to date.Dallas radio show host Barry Champlain's penchant for abusing and pushing people's buttons has led him to an offer he couldn't refuse...A chance for taking his show to national syndication. Upon hearing the news, Champlain subjects his ex-wife (Ellen Greene, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, LEON: THE PROFESSIONAL) along with his co-workers to an unforgettable night of offending his audience. But somewhere, a mysterious killer is lurking in the shadows...Bogosian gives probably an ingenious performance as the arrogant host with intense energy and bravura presence. Another actor that also stood out is Michael Wincott (THE DOORS, THE CROW) as the air-headed metal kid who somehow ended up as an unscheduled guest. At the center of this chaos is Greene who brings sincerity and concern to her committed performance.Stone delivers a live-wire satire on "Shock radio" and the politics of adjusting Barry Champlain's controversial persona for the masses. However, the issue of media predominance would later be revisited in NATURAL BORN KILLERS six years later.TALK RADIO is a film that gets you to the core. It is an underrated experience that you will never forget.

"It's the last neighborhood in America", says shock-radio host Barry Champlain about his guerrilla war talk show, where every evening after dark he ignites the Dallas airwaves in a one-man assault against ignorance, complacency, mindless bureaucracy, redneck racism, and (most of all) against himself. The life and death of the inflammatory Champlain (loosely suggested by the neo-Nazi murder of Alan Berg) gives Oliver Stone his most challenging film to date, thanks in large part to a strong, stage-based screenplay by Eric Bogosian. The author himself portrays the late-night radio personality, an embittered liberal with a gift for gab, engaged in a masochistic tug-of-war with an invisible audience. His audience hates him but can't stop listening; he hates his audience but can't stop talking; and the more volatile his show becomes the higher his ratings soar.The anger and vitriol he invites from his fans might be good for business, but is it entertainment of public self-flagellation? The answer in Oliver Stone's atypically tense, claustrophobic portrait is a little bit of both, and Champlain's acid personality will either pin audiences to their seats or else drive them from the room. Without his own script to weigh him down the director is free to indulge his trademark camera calisthenics with persuasive skill, creating a lush midnight ambiance filtered through masochistic paranoia. Stone uses the stage-bound studio setting to good advantage, transforming it with his fluid, insinuating camera into a menacing, claustrophobic prison of glass, chrome and neon.But as usual the director wildly overstates his message. Like Champlain, Stone doesn't know when to quit, and the often extraordinary tension built into Bogosian's dialogue is almost spoiled by a long, pointless flashback (shot in standard flashback sepia tones), by redundant moralizing during the climactic on-air monologue, and by a typically overwrought resolution. Otherwise the film is an often spellbinding character study, and a sharply focused snapshot of the public and private paranoia unique to America in the mid-1980s.