-== DESTINY TURNS ON THE RADIO ==-

Viewed from the side, Quentin Tarantino, with his crescent moon profile, looks exactly like my dear grandmother. But I suspect Grandma would have been a better actor. The ubiquitous enfant terrible of the American cinema has turned up again, this time as a smug otherworldly nincompoop called Johnny Destiny, in a movie with the ominous (and, as it turns out, meaningless) title Destiny Turns On The Radio. They will need a big broom to sweep this one under the carpet. Sometimes just tiresome and sometimes spectacularly awful, Destiny is the kind of grating art whimsy disaster that gets people jobs directing very special episodes of Blossom. The movie wants to be a zany, high-spirited homage to genre, as so many pictures do these days. That, no doubt, is the reason the filmmakers have pressed the wooden Tarantino into service--as soon as we see his big face, I suppose, we'll all start flashing back to the fresh, tightly woven Pulp Fiction, with its neat riffs on B-movie noir. Maybe in a pig's eye we will. The haphazard story is about a convicted bank robber named Julian (Dylan McDermott) and the girl he left behind, lounge singer Nancy Travis. But noir isn't a big enough pond: there's also some slapstick spiritualism, in a desperately unfunny Carlos Castaneda-meets-Bugs Bunny vein. A mystical wolf keeps turning up out of the blue, and there's an electrified swimming pool that links this world to a series of parallel universes. The Tarantino character is a kind of secular deity, the patron saint of gamblers. He goes around making fatuous remarks--"Vegas is a town of limitless possibilities," and "Luck changes, it always changes." Most of the action takes place in a Las Vegas dive called the Marilyn Motel. It's a theme fleabag: all the rooms are named after Marilyn Monroe movies. Julian, of course, is drawn to The Misfits suite. Wacky, senseless turnabouts substitute for narrative and plot development--Travis, for example, has gotten pregnant during a vivid R.E.M. nap. Lots of misfiring cleverness, endless twangy spaghetti western music, darling vintage outfits, and so on. The movie's idea of really good fun is a running gag about a casino manager who is always fingering his tallywhacker (through his trousers, of course). Doggedly charmless, the whole thing. --Mary Brennan

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