Talk Radio

Like Paddy Chayefski's timeless masterpiece, "Network," Stone's "Talk Radio" is one of those prescient films that seems to gain meaning and importance with every passing year. While Talk Radio doesn't (and does not presume to) rise to the former's cinematic grandeur, one need look no further than Tucson, 2011 to understand the insidious danger posed by its real-life, present-day T.V. and Radio counterparts. Just as the pervasive blurring of "news" and "entertainment," the consolidation of corporate broadcast power, and the death of broadcasting's responsibility to serve the public "interest, convenience and necessity" have turned Chayefski's "dark comedy" - once described as "over the top" - into an even darker and more chilling cautionary tale, so has the rise of today's incendiary broadcast fear and hate mongers left us to wonder just where "the top" really is. Bogosian, long underrated, delivers a potent and prophetic masterpiece. In Stone's hands, the denouement, when it comes, is no less freightening for its tragic predictability. The plot summary above suggests that "Barry and his 'fans' - the lonely, the angry and the dangerous - know that talk is not cheap, and words can kill." Do they? Do we? Perhaps Stone, like Chayefski's "Map Prophet of the Airwaves" Howard Beale, is really exhorting us to end the madness - before it's too late.