MOVIES
Quentin Tarantino reveals who his final movie ‘The Movie Critic’ is about
After months of speculation, the director clarified the subject of his 10th and final movie.
Quentin Tarantino is busy working on his 10th and final movie, to be titled ‘The Movie Critic’.
While many speculated that the move would be about prolific 1970s movie critic Pauline Kael, the director has said that this is not the case.
In fact, the movie critic he’ll be focusing on is a man who wrote for the movie section of a porn magazine in the 1970s, and while not as well-known as Kael, holds a special place in Tarantino’s memory and one of his earliest introductions to the world of film.
An unknown porn magazine movie critic
In a recent interview with Deadline, Tarantino reminisced about an old job he held as a teen, which was to load porn magazines into a vending machine and empty out the quarters.
“All the other stuff was too skanky to read but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page,” he said of the unknown writer who made an impact on a young Tarantino.
The real-life magazine will not be named in the movie, and instead has been renamed ‘The Popstar Pages.’
“He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell,” he said of the critic.
“His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle [Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver] might be if he were a film critic.”
He continued, saying, “the porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his s--- was really funny. He was as rude as hell.”
In his research for ‘The Movie Critic’, Tarantino uncovered personal tidbits about the writer’s life.
“He wrote like he was 55 but he was only in his early to mid-30s. He died in his late thirties. It wasn’t clear for a while but now I’ve done some more research and I think it was it was complications due to alcoholism.”
Who will play the mysterious movie critic?
Tarantino has yet to decide who he will cast in the upcoming movie, which is set to go into “pre-pre production” sometime soon.
“I haven’t decided yet but it’s going to be somebody in the 35-year-old ball park. It’ll definitely be a new leading man for me.” The ‘Pulp Fiction’ director has most recently cast Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in ‘Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood’, but considers them “too old” for the part.
“I do have an idea of somebody I can imagine doing it really well,” he teased, without naming any names.