Sumith Prasad
The shooting of Quentin Tarantino’s tenth and apparently final feature film ‘The Movie Critic’ is set to begin in late September 2023. Los Angeles, California, serves as the principal location of the film, which revolves around a critic who writes movie reviews for a porno rag called The Popstar Pages. The film is set in 1977 California.
Tarantino has been avoiding questions about the highly-anticipated film. “That’s a long story, I can’t tell you guys until you see the movie. I’m tempted to do some of the characters’ monologues right now, but I’m not going to. Maybe if there was less video cameras. You just have to wait and see,” he said while attending the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. However, he described the protagonist of the film as “a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag,” according to Deadline.
Although Tarantino hasn’t explicitly revealed who exactly was the real-life “Movie Critic,” he offered certain insights about the person while attending Cannes 2023. “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. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle [Robert De Niro’s character in ‘Taxi Driver‘] might be if he were a film critic,” the director told Deadline. “Think about Travis’s diary entries. […] He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his shit was really funny. He was as rude as hell,” he added.
Regardless of the critic’s identity, he will not be reviewing the film based on his 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,” Tarantino further added in the Deadline article. There are no reports about who will play the titular character of the film but Tarantino is expected to cast an actor who is around 35 years old, who will also be a “new leading man” for the director. In the upcoming months, we can expect further updates about the film’s cast and other characters.
‘The Movie Critic’ is expected to be Tarantino’s final feature film as a director. “I don’t believe you should stay onstage until people are begging you to get off. I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more. I do think directing is a young man’s game, and I like the idea of an umbilical cord connection from my first to my last movie. I’m not trying to ridicule anyone who thinks differently, but I want to go out while I’m still hard,” the director explained the reasoning behind his “10-film filmography” during a press event for his film ‘The Hateful Eight.’
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