|
|
|
Eric Bogdosian can't act. The guy's stiff and leaden, straight outta the Al Gore school of Public Speaking. And his character's parallels to Howard Stern are a bit too obvious, all the way to the long curly hair.
There's no real story, just one caller after another, and a bunch of people who drift in and out of the periphery of this cloistered radio world.
But that may be director Oliver Stone's point: For Bogdosian's character, there is no life away from the microphone. His relationships are a joke, his one public appearance is a debacle when the crowd unanimously boos him offstage, and his career is uncertain as a dream. Stone deliberately favors tight camera shots, close-ups of Bogdosian's face, lips, cigarette, to emphasize the claustrophobic world his protagonist has created.
It's a disconcerting and uncomfortable tension, and we're a little voyeuristic peeking into some of these too-fragile places. The anger and repetition of the movie serves to emphasize the frustration of a radio host who's accommodated a few too many assholes on Line 1, all of them eager to share their self-indulgent insights into niggers and Jews.
There's a potentially interesting movie here. Too bad Eric Bogdosian can't act.