Although at first it was rumored that ‘The Movie Critic’ would be inspired by the figure of the critic Pauline Kael, Tarantino has denied it.
Quentin Tarantino prepares to make his latest film, ‘The Movie Critic’, set in Los Angeles in the late 1970s (one of Tarantino’s favorite eras). When the news was announced, there was speculation that the lead character might be inspired by Pauline Kael, a well-respected critic who Tarantino is known to be a fan of. But in a new interview with DeadlineTarantino revealed that the inspiration for his tenth film is quite another.
Tarantino has confirmed that ‘The Movie Critic’ is set in 1977 California and “is based on a guy who actually lived, but was never really famous, and used to write movie reviews for porn magazines.” Tarantino read these reviews when he was a teenager and had a job loading pornographic magazines into a vending machine. “All the other stuff was too filthy to read, but then there was this magazine that had a really interesting movie page. He wrote about mainstream movies and was a second rate critic. I think he was a very good critic.”
Tarantino adds: “I was cynical as hell. Reviews of him were a cross between Howard Stern in his early days and what Travis Bickle [el personaje de Robert De Niro en ‘Taxi Driver’] Could be if I was a movie critic. Think about Travis’s journal entries. But the porn magazine critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. cursed He used racial slurs. But the shit about her was so much fun. He was rude as hell. He wrote as if he were 55 years old, but he was only about 35 years old. 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 complications due to alcoholism. In the film, the “porn rag” the character writes for will be called ‘The Popstar Pages’.”
Tarantino is looking for an actor around 35 years old as the leading film critic., so Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt are automatically left out of the candidates. And, importantly, the actor will be an American, not a British actor playing an American. Tarantino said: “Obviously nothing against the British, but we’re living in a really strange time right now. I think when people look back at this era of cinema and it’s just all these British actors pretending to be American and all these Australian actors pretending to be Americans, they are like ghosts. No one is acting in their own voice.”
Tarantino will head to Los Angeles next month to begin “pre-pre-production” on ‘The Movie Critic.’
Source: Fotogramas
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