Nerding Day: Destiny Turns On The Radio

In 1995 Quentin Tarantino was famous enough to do pretty much anything he wanted, which is why it's super confusing that he decided to play a bit part in what had to be one of the worst movies to come out that year, Destiny Turns On The Radio. I get how you can probably fool most actors into thinking they're making something strange and profound by filming several lingering shots of a coyote staring into the distance, but Quentin Tarantino should not have fallen for that shit.

Even the poster for Destiny Turns On The Radio doesn't know how to describe Destiny Turns On The Radio. It's not really a romantic adventure; it's more of a comedy but with no jokes at all, or a crime movie where the crime is three years in the past or a fantasy where the only fantasy element is how everyone thinks Quentin Tarantino looks like a cool guy.

Seriously, everyone in this movie is weirdly miscast, but Roger Ebert said it best in his review of the film which he opened with: "The first of many disappointments comes early in 'Destiny Turns On Radio' when Quentin Tarantino appears on the screen." I agree. I was also bummed he showed up, but I thought I immediately knew who his character was supposed to be-- a weird loser, perfect casting. He's dressed like an Elvis impersonator (a role he'd played before on Golden Girls, and the movie is set in Vegas, so that makes sense). He does kind of look like Elvis in a late-stage Multiplicity clone way.

The character Tarantino is playing isn't an offbeat, nerdy Elvis impersonator, though. He's playing Johnny Destiny, the god of luck. He rises from a swimming pool nude like a big hairy baby, but in a cool way! This, this, is supposed to be cool:

Casting a god in a movie is your one chance to get the hottest, beefiest beef slab of a person and not have to explain why mild mannered scientist Dwayne The Rock Johnson spends 47 hours a week at the gym after work. The god of luck could pick however he wanted to look, and like, this is what he settled on? I don't want to be mean, but I do. I do want to be mean. That's weird. It's weird that no one questioned that. I mean, he looks like a guy who would tell you with a straight face that his name is Johnny Destiny. Maybe that was a key part of casting?

The thesis of this movie is, "It's a time of limitless possibilities", which I know because multiple characters say it sometimes literally straight into the camera. I'm assuming this sounded good in the pitch phase. The movie's about choice and luck, and roads not taken, and how Vegas represents so much opportunity for both success AND failure, which is true, but it's also incredibly vague and meaningless. The movie would make just as much sense if the characters kept saying, "stuff is things sometimes, you know?"

The main character is Dylan McDermott, who plays Julian, an escaped prisoner looking to get the money he stole and his old girlfriend back and get out of Vegas before the cops catch him. The one thing I did like about the movie is it shows how stupid both cops and criminals are. The cops start looking for Julian at the Marilyn Motel in Vegas, where they caught him, which is the last place he should go, but he is, in fact, there, because stuff is things sometimes.

Julian supposedly planned and executed the robbery with only the help of his friend Harry Thoreau, a philosophical guy who hangs out by an empty pool all day because he thinks it's "a devil's watering hole." This turns out to be because Johnny Destiny enters and exits the mortal world through that pool, and when he appeared three years ago, on the night of the bank robbery, he electrocuted Harry and stole all the funds from the robbery. Again, I can't stress enough how a naked, pulsating Quentin Tarantino appears twenty minutes into this movie.

So, Julian starts the movie with a run of bad luck, the money is gone, and his girlfriend Lucille is shacking up with a casino owner named Tuerto. There should have been a person on set whose only job was to manage the pronunciation of the name Tuerto because everyone in the film has to say it at least once, and no two people pronounce it the same. We get some Twerdo. We get a little Torto, and eventually, it devolves into Twertle, which sounds more like a Pokemon than a mob boss.

As the police chase Julian around, Johnny Destiny pops in to interfere every once in a while like a little scamp, sometimes in Julian's favor and sometimes not. He jumps in front of a cop car to disrupt a chase scene, but he also convinces a record producer named Vinnie Vidivici to sign Lucille to his label, which makes her iffy about leaving town with Julian. I can't point out a single scene in the movie that's supposed to be funny, but it's all very melodramatic. In a flashback to Julian and Lucille's meeting, Lucille says, "I'm not sticking around this town long enough to fall in love."

Julian replies, "Then you should have left yesterday," and plants this aggressive kiss on her. It's so forceful you can hear their bodies slap together. Either that or they ADRed it in later by whacking two slabs of ribs together.

I'm pretty sure this is what the movie thinks is the peak of its comedy. The writers wrote a drama, but it was bad, so someone said, “wait, is this supposed to be bad?” And they said “... … … sure, why not!” Which is sad because honestly, even though that line is corny as hell, let's say we were in a universe where it was delivered sincerely. Would I throw my dancing Santa panties at the screen? No, because that's disrespectful, and I only own five pairs of underwear, but I would consider it!

At every turn, it feels like the director doesn't believe in the movie and tries to fix its flaws by making the most insane decision possible. Every single scene has porny electric guitar underscoring just to remind you this is Las Vegas, and it's sleazy. So you'll have a scene of something perfectly normal, like Thoreau fixing a car, and it's got this weirdly intense bluesy soundtrack. They aren't sure what scenes are going to hit, so they have to make everything as dramatic as possible because maybe that's comedy? Who can tell?

It also swings wildly from a more realistic drama to a completely fantastical one with no buffer. Lucille and Julian will be fighting about how they can't have a real future if he's always on the run from the law. Then she'll stop the fight to be like, "I know you were in prison for three years, but I'm pregnant, and I'm pretty sure you're the father because I dreamt we had sex once."

Johnny Destiny decides it's time to go back to wherever he came from, so he asks Thoreau to fix a crack in the pool because I guess the integrity of the pool is essential for him to return to Luck Land. Once it's refilled, it's all magical and electric again. Johnny says it's full of, "all the roads you didn't take, all the choices you didn't make, all of the numbers you didn't bet on."

The police finally track Julian down, and he's holding the money he stole (which Johnny returned to him; I guess he just carried it around for three years for fun). Julian and Lucille end up escaping by plunging into the pool portal together. Yes, they chose to follow nude Quentin Tarantino into the nude Quentin Tarantino universe. They’re in Johnny Destiny Hell right now. I guess in a time of limitless possibilities, you do have the option to choose the worst one, just like everyone in this movie did.

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