Quentin Tarantino has revealed that his next and reportedly final film, The Movie Critic, is based on a reviewer who wrote for a porno magazine. He is looking to cast “a new leading man” in the “35-year-old ballpark” for the role.
In an interview with Deadline, Tarantino clarified that the movie wasn’t inspired by the esteemed New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, as previously speculated. Instead, The Movie Critic takes place in 1977 California and is based on “a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.”
Tarantino encountered the critic’s writing during one of his teenage jobs: loading porn magazines into a vending machine. Though he didn’t reveal the magazine’s name in the interview, it’ll be called The Popstar Pages in his upcoming movie.
“All the other stuff was too skanky to read but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page,” Tarantino remembered. “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.”
The filmmaker described the critic’s reviews as “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 added, “The porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his shit was really funny. He was as rude as hell.”
On top of that, the movie reviewer “wrote like he was 55 but was only in his early to mid-30s.” Based on his research, Tarantino believes he died in his late 30s from “complications due to alcoholism.”
Tarantino plans to start “pre-pre production” on The Movie Critic next month in Los Angeles. No one has been cast in the starring role yet, but Tarantino will be looking for “a new leading man” since frequent collaborators Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt are too old for the part, which he said is “going to be somebody in the 35-year-old ballpark.”
Just don’t expect any explicit sex scenes in the film. As Tarantino recently said, “Sex is not part of my vision of cinema.” While we await more details about The Movie Critic, revisit our ranking of Tarantino’s films from worst to best.
