Quentin Tarantino Aims To 'Remake' Movies From The '70s Within His Next Film, The Movie Critic
Whenever Quentin Tarantino makes a movie, the movie news apparatus kicks into overdrive. Ideally, we would walk in cold to every movie, but with Tarantino there's a breadcrumb dropping game that invites us to suss out plot details. For years, it was common for his scripts to get leaked to the internet (and he seemed relatively okay with this), but he was furious when an early draft of "The Hateful Eight" made the cyber rounds prior to shooting. He wasn't done, and he didn't want the public taking a look under the hood before he was done calibrating the engine.
The plot of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" was kept almost completely under wraps until its 2019 Cannes debut, and I expected more of the same with his next (and purportedly final) feature, "The Movie Critic." But minor details have been seeping out here and there, and Paul Schrader just let slip what might be a fairly big reveal in terms of the movie's intent.
Revisiting the vengeful 'Rolling Thunder'
In an interview with IndieWire, Schrader, whose "Master Gardener" is out in theaters today, revealed that Tarantino recently reached out to him about paying explicit homage to the director's Vietnam-Vet-takes-revenge-on-murdering-scumbags classic "Rolling Thunder" (a movie Tarantino loves so much, he named his short-lived boutique distribution arm at Miramax after it). Per Schrader:
"[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."
So "The Movie Critic" is going to be "Cinema Speculation: The Movie"?
Film history, Tarantino style
"Cinema Speculation" is the title of Tarantino's provocative collection of movie essays (published in 2022) wherein he rants and raves over the films that shaped his cinephile DNA. In classic Tarantino fashion, he doesn't hold back. Indeed, he gives Schrader's porn-industry peregrination "Hardcore" quite the working over.
While he adores "Rolling Thunder," he notes that Schrader's script was a tad more serrated before it was rewritten by Heywood Gould and directed by John Flynn (e.g. William Devane's protagonist was a racist). It would've been a much different, less straightforward kind of exploitation flick.
When "The Movie Critic" was first announced, there was speculation that Tarantino was using "The Movie Critic" to riff on the career of Pauline Kael. He's since refuted this, saying, quite contradictorily, that the film "is not devoted to a real critic" and is about a "real [male critic]." Tarantino could be playing games, which is fine, but if Schrader is correct, Tarantino will be redoing elements of '70s movies.
In the case of "Rolling Thunder," this means restaging the climactic brothel shootout. It's a great sequence, one that finds Devane and a pre-stardom Tommy Lee Jones cleaning up the bad guys. I've always considered Flynn's film a "perfect/no notes" affair, but if Tarantino is going to shoot Schrader's original ending... let's go! People are already wondering if he'll shoot a segment of "Taxi Driver" from Brian De Palma's perspective (as imagined in Tarantino's book). We know from "Inglourious Basterds" and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" that Tarantino has a penchant for reshaping history. "The Movie Critic" could have the filmmaker making the '70s shake out to his fanciful, yet exacting wishes.