-== DECK THE PLEX WITH TARANTINO ==-

Will any child want to jump out of bed on Christmas morning and rush off to a Quentin Tarantino film? Can Wag the Dog possibly be mistaken for a Snoopy holiday special? Does the 19th century Australia of Oscar and Lucinda have nearly the same Christmas kick as Scrooge's London? And Woody Allen, musing on death and betrayal--now there's the cure for seasonal depression.

The release of ambitious films at year's end has nothing to do with noel and everything to do with the Dec. 31 deadline for Academy Award qualifiers. While real people flock to Scream 2, movie people begin their homework by seeing Oscar contenders. Most of these films don't open till Christmas, but we can't wait. Here are five shiny baubles for right now.

IT'S PULP, BUT IT AIN'T QUITE PULP FICTION

The wait is over. It's 3 1/2 years since Pulp Fiction exploded at the Cannes Film Festival, and now everyone can stop wondering what Quentin Tarantino will do next. The answer, in JACKIE BROWN: more of the same, and less.

The film is an elaborate, fitfully funny Tarantoon about chatty folks with big guns. Working reverently from Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, the writer-director tosses half a dozen wary people into the pit of their avarice and lets us guess who will survive. Pam Grier's title character is a flight attendant running money from Mexico to California for her drug boss Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson), who is variously inconvenienced by his lazily taunting girlfriend (Bridget Fonda), his low-IQ henchman (Robert De Niro), an eager fed (Michael Keaton) and an aging bail bondsman (Robert Forster), whose creased face is a road map of disappointment in the venality of humankind.

There's little moral rooting interest here; the fun comes from expert actors spitting out the lurid rhythms of punk patter. You want affability fragging into menace? Tarantino can write it for you. Jackson and Fonda, especially, can deliver it with a swell sting.

But at 2 1/2 hours, it all plays like the rough assembly of a 90-min. caper film--an anecdote told at epic length. Grier, foxy lady of '70s blaxploitation, is given little chance to radiate; you never even glimpse her magnificent shoulders. As for Tarantino, he is playing peekaboo with his sizable talent. Jackie Brown marks time, lots of it, between Pulp Fiction and his next great project.

The wait goes on.