sctwilm One of the more obvious truths in show business is that, since people have different tastes in art, there are many different kinds of movies, and many different ways of talking about them. As my Uncle Al used to say, "Kid, that's why Mister Ford makes 'em in a lot of different colors now."My late father was a lyricist back in the days of Tin Pan Alley; he sold his first song lyric before he was twenty, and he spent his entire life delighting in, and making his living with, his imagination. He treasured imaginative ways of telling stories, and I guess that's why I married a poet. I will forgive an otherwise uninspired movie if it offers an imaginative and unusual way of thinking about an idea.Art, like religion, is a cultural universal; every society on earth makes art. In homogeneous cultures, and in all totalitarian societies, artistic orthodoxy is highly valued. The more diverse a culture becomes, the more tolerant it becomes of subversive art. The American film industry today is the most diverse in the world. Instead of an unchanging stream of movies glorifying the fatherland or the revolution, we Americans, or at least some of us, have been entertained by the animated fantasy of Walt Disney, the profound vision of Orson Welles, and even the as-yet-immature imagination of Jack Baran. Who's Jack Baran? I'm coming to that.One of my father's favorite songs was Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen's "That Old Black Magic," which contains the line, "You're the mate that fate had me created for." And that's what DESTINY TURNS ON THE RADIO, directed by Jack Baran, is all about, a comedic fable about luck or fate or destiny, and the mythology that our culture has constructed around it. It's not a new idea, but it's an interesting idea, and it's more interesting to me than whether the good guy will get the bad guy before he blows up another building. The fact that young Jack Baran didn't quite pull it off is forgivable.DESTINY TURNS ON THE RADIO was written by two young graduates of Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, which supports independent filmmaking, that is, movies not driven by the major studios and their commercial formulas for box-office success. Well, they certainly avoided formulas. They've also avoided box-office success. I saw this movie twice the week it opened, and I can say for a fact that at least four other people in my town also saw it because they were in the theater with me.I found DESTINY TURNS ON THE RADIO to be provocative, witty and entertaining, but I surely can see why it's not everyone's cup of tea. Its theatrical colloquy and supernatural premise combine to create a script that probably reads a lot better than it plays. The incongruity between the theme and the characters demands an extreme suspension of disbelief, something most film-goers are simply not willing to do. So what's to like? Well, I liked this movie because it appealed to me like a quirky short story by P. G. Wodehouse, lightweight but clever. I liked it because James LeGros does a terrific job in a supporting role. I also liked it because Nancy Travis sings "That Old Black Magic" in a scene that had me tripping over my tongue.I guess what I'm saying is that I liked DESTINY TURNS ON THE RADIO because I think my father would have liked it. It is an imaginative first effort from a bunch of young filmmakers, and investing in it was an act of courage. And evidently, for many people, so was sitting through it.

LostHighway101 "Destiny Turns on the Radio" is an extremely fun trip into a weird mythological netherworld of Las Vegas. It is a film that implements a purposefully corny magical realism to tell a story of an escaped convict rediscovering his destiny. And magical it is. This film is in a class of a few other 90's films (all of which never really found an audience outside the late-night-Cinemax crowd) that capture a magically bright, giddy, and surreal atmosphere -- this one in a gleeful Las Vegas setting. Its classmates include "Box of Moonlight" and "Mojave Moon".Despite a few technical flaws (the sound's iffy and so is some blocking -- and I'd lose Tarrantino if this was my film), the movie just works in an odd sort of way. The cast seems to be having a great time (note especially Tracey Walter and James Legros' father-son's-best-friend bonding scenes), the locations and cinematography are dazzling, and it provides an intangible escape into a weird cinematic netherworld. It's as if some portal opened up to these filmmakers in this specific class of the mid-90s and enlightened them all with late-night-Cinemax charm. More, please!

trevorten This film seems like a Tarantino-sponsored "mind altering" party, complete with improvisation and wit that ultimately seems to fall flat. I laughed hysterically at how embarrassingly poor a movie with this great of a cast was turning out. It certainly entertains though, in a train wreck sort of fashion. Who knows, maybe that was the point. As far as the performances go: McDermott was sort of underwhelming as the lead but it was funny to see him pre-"Practice" wearing tacky royal blue dress pants throughout. James LeGros gave his usual steady performance as a neurotic-type. Tarantino is WAY better off behind the camera but his acting performances in Pulp Fiction, From Dusk 'til Dawn and Desperado were all oscar-worthy compared to this one, although he didn't have much to work with here, script wise. Always great to see Richard Edson in the small but memorable role.

roberts-2 The film tells a story about marginal people--people living in the interstices and on the edges of our system. Stories of this type allow writers and directors to concentrate on interactions among a fairly small group, and (usually) they create interesting, likable people for us. This film, with its bow to magic realism, is both amusing and surprising. Tarantino is not effective as an actor, I feel. Apparently he is too self-conscious or, perhaps, does not rehearse. Aside from his performance (and it is not actually bad), the performances are fine. Just about every actor in the film does a good job.