DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The 16:9 enhanced widescreen transfer is often murky as darkness saturates a visual design adorned with a restless, gliding camera. The film’s only real lightness occurs during the flashback scenes, evocative of a hopeful, even innocent time. All else is oppressive and Bogosian is entrapped in the glass studio, making for some stunning uses of reflections on windows as a major compositional motif. Talk Radio is a contemporary film noir, deliberately using low-key lighting and roving camerawork to encircle the protagonist – sometimes he sits at his console, other times he prowls his cage whilst wearing a headset: a trapped beast. This sense of enclosure was thought a departure for Stone, who was known for expansive, multi-character films full of rapid location changes. Although Talk Radio is an experiment in that regard, it is recognizably a Stone film, thanks in part to the studied effects of Stone’s frequent cinematographer Robert Richardson. Despite the limited sets, the film is never static and maintains a fierce sense of energy, though much of it is through Bogosian’s extraordinary voice. There is a palpable sense of menace and paranoia throughout and the true comedic highlight is the confrontation between Bogosian and Wincott, surely one of the most ironically funny scenes in American film. The ending, with its implications of a gliding soul, is fitting and indeed somewhat haunting.
Sound
The sound transfer is available in Dolby Digital Surround. Effects contain disembodied voices, source music and the noise of nocturnal radio broadcasts. Despite some directional play, it is rather centered, not coping as well with this potential as might be possible in a re-mastered transfer. Voice-over echoes nicely over corridors, furthering a sense of such space affected by voice. Bogosian’s mannerisms are maintained and often in the background is there a subtle sense of overlapping voices and sounds. As much as the visuals fully capture Bogosian’s isolation and loneliness, so the audio design captures the desperate authority in his voice, as if such a voice draws unto it a culture needing to vent an otherwise directionless rage: hence the film moves from caller to caller, voice to voice as stages in Bogosian’s fall. Ironies abound, especially in one tense scene as a distraught Bogosian cuts to a commercial containing the amplified sound of “cockroaches mating”. The individuality of the call-ins is always maintained and there is a terse humor accompanying it. The judicious score nicely ties in to Bogosian’s mood changes in the final stages where he seems in almost rapid freefall in his verbal assaults on callers. His final confession is a dynamic scene although his self-awareness cannot prevent his fate. The final collage of voices and beeps as the camera circles Dallas at night is an ideal effect. read more
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