Quentin Tarantino is hard at work on his tenth and seemingly final directorial effort “The Movie Critic” which will mark his first feature since 2019’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”.
With “The Movie Critic,” he’s doing a film that is said to be set in late 1970s Los Angeles with a female lead at its center. That led to speculation it would be inspired by the story of the legendary Pauline Kael – something Tarantino has since denied saying the film is “not devoted to a real critic”.
However, fellow filmmaker Paul Schrader, out promoting his new film “Master Gardener,” appears to have given away one element of Tarantino’s new film.
He tells Indiewire that Tarantino recently reached out to him about an explicit homage to the Schrader-penned 1977 Vietnam vets get revenge feature “Rolling Thunder”:
“[T]his may have changed – but about a month ago he was making a film, had something to do with filmmaking in the ’70s. And part of this, he’s going to use clips from movies from the ’70s, but he’s also gonna remake movies from the ’70s. And he asked me, ‘Can I redo the ending of ‘Rollling Thunder?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, go for it. I’d love to see you redo the ending of “Rolling Thunder.”‘ Who knows whether he actually will or not. But it was something that was tickling his imagination in a very Tarantino-esque way.”
Across his films, the director has shown a tendency for rewriting existing narratives such as ‘Hollywood’ offering a different spin on the Manson family murders, and “Inglourious Basterds” changing up Hitler’s demise.
Could this film see him take moments from several of his beloved 1970s movies, such as the brothel shootout that ends “Rolling Thunder,” and offer new spins on them as part of its narrative (eg. scenes from movies that the titular critic watches)? The comments have certainly made the project sound even more intriguing.
