TALK RADIO

Cole's Rating: ★★ ½
Jesse's Rating: ★ ½

Director: Oliver Stone
Year: 1988
Cast: Eric Bogosian, Ellen Greene, Leslie Hope
Genre: Drama
MPAA Rating: R

        Talk Radio, above all else, is a torturously frustrating film. It gets so many things right, and tells a promising story (inspired by the death and life of Alan Berg) about a tortured soul. It does so many things correctly and it’s acted superbly. I hate that it wasn’t a very good film—I really hate that. Talk Radio is a dark, dark telling that could very well have been a moving, haunting picture like other of Oliver Stone’s films. Throughout this movie’s entire duration, I wanted to grow to love the main character, I wanted to become disturbed with the film’s brilliance, and I wanted to walk away feeling fulfilled. What’s terribly dejecting is that none of those things happened.

        It tried and succeeded for some, and didn’t for others. This movie beholds many crippling faults that dilute its inner beauty. Barry Champlain is a talk radio host. He’s rude, condescending, and hilarious. Some people loathe him, some love him, some idolize him, and some pity him. Everywhere he goes, he gets ridiculed by someone, and cherished by another. Inside, he’s an angry person; yet we never really know why. That’s the gist of Talk Radio, and you sort of get that right off the bat. Screenplay writers Oliver Stone and Eric Bogosian deliver scene after scene of more of the same: claustrophobic, ill-natured conversations with racists, druggies, losers, killers, and, astonishingly enough, Barry’s ex-wife. Early on the movie, these scenes were original and absorbing. As time progressed, they began to get annoying and redundant. These scenes draw comparison to that of Pump Up the Volume, which is a better film only because as the radio scenes progress, so does the development of the main character. That isn’t the case with Talk Radio, because I felt as if this man had been the same for a while, and I couldn’t figure out why. I didn’t like him, and that may be why this is an emotionally ineffective picture. In “Volume”, though Slater’s character isn’t a good guy, you’re rooting for him. Here, I didn’t know what to make of this stranger, or what to do with him as a viewer.

        However much that a great cast and potent story can do to an uninspiring script, an air-tight set, and alienated characters was done, which doesn’t fully make it a good film. A year after Talk Radio came Born on the Fourth of July, then three years later came JFK. It’s clear that Stone’s scripts started to focus in more gradually as years went by. With his last few films being nowhere near as good as they use to be, let’s hope that he makes at least a few more dark, influential, cinematically significant films that leave a mark in the directorial industry. Otherwise, there might be more movies like Talk Radio.

-Written by Cole Pollyea

Jesse's Thoughts: As an avid listener of the medium of talk radio (mostly sports talk), I found this film to be a horribly misguided interpretation of the subject matter. In Talk Radio, we see a radio shock jock who is not anywhere near what a real one would act like. We also get callers that don't sound anything like actual callers on a real radio show. So with that mind, I would say that this is probably Oliver Stone's worst effort as a director. In fact, watching this movie made me think that Stone was never even behind the camera in the first place. It kinda seemed as though star Eric Bogosian (radio personality Barry Champlain) was in control or took over (I mean he did help out with the script). Nevertheless, if Oliver Stone did in fact direct this thing, then he should have known better. You got an actor in Bogosian who says his lines quickly (and seems to memorize them quite well) but is tragically unlikable, hypocritical, and just plain full of himself (I'm talking about his character in the flick, mind you). Added to that, you have supporting players in John C. McGinley (a regular in a lot of Stone's films) and Alec Baldwin (woefully underused as the program director Dan) who deserve better. Talk Radio's biggest problem: the script which sinks everybody. Overall, this is a film that should probably never have been made. Thankfully, almost everyone involved recovered nicely.