Talk Radio [HD]

Intense and brooding meditation on life
Often overlooked ,'Talk Radio' is one of Oliver Stone's most enduring pieces of work. It's based on a radio play written by Eric Bogosian who is the main character in this, the film version .Bogosian delivers a powerful performance as the tortured, acerbic DJ shock-jock Barry Champlain.

Bogosian's play itself is based on the death of Denver DJ Alan Berg who was shot dead in 1984 by a White Power/Aryan group known as The Order.

Bogosian delivers a brilliant performance as Champlain - a former tailor's assistant in Dallas who is discovered by a local DJ and after audition, becomes a late-night DJ on a radio station.

The basic storyline is that Champlain does a nighttime show called 'Nighttalk' where he gets to talk live to various sick and twisted individuals who ring up. The characters who inhabit Champlain's life are Laura - his lover and assistant, Stew - his producer and similarly-sarcastic wit played by Stone favourite John C.McGinley and Dan the...

Oliver Stone's best movie, Eric Bogosian's tour-de-force
This movie works so well because unlike with his other films, Oliver Stone just lets the material do the work for him. The material and the actor/playwright, actually; Eric Bogosian's excellent portrayal of a talk-show host skirting his psyche's edge on-air and off is jaw-dropping. You watch this guy weave himself into a tighter and tighter shell as his world crumbles and feel helpless to stop his flight to destruction. Ellen Green and other supporting cast members round things out, and TALK RADIO ends up being the most powerful vision that Stone has ever brought to the screen, before or since.

The Scariest Film I've Ever Seen!
No, it's not the violence; there is no physical violence except a few seconds of gun fire in the last moments of the film. No, it's not vertiginous dangling from cliffs or windows; nearly the whole film takes place in a radio sound studio, with the central character seated at a desk. No, there aren't any zombies, ax wielders, vampire, bug-eyed space invaders, or syndicate hit men. All that kind of scary stuff I can easily process as unreal, mere cinema illusion ... [except those dangling-from-windows scenes; they give me goosebumps.] ... but the scary things in this film are the emotions, the hatred and anger seething in the words of the unseen callers to Talk Radio. The violence they threaten against provocative shock jock Barry Champlain, acted by playwright Eric Bogosian, is horrifyingly real. The racism, anti-semitism, homophobia and sado-masochistic perversion the callers spew is verbatim what you can find in written words on comment threads here on amazon. Nothing is said in...

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