Mark Duplass, whom you may know alternatively as one of the stars of The League and as the director of Cyrus, Jeff, Who Lives At Home, and The Puffy Chair, recently tweeted his 19-year-old review of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, the first of the Sunrise/Sunset trilogy, for his high school newspaper, published in 1995, when Duplass would’ve been 18.
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There aren’t too many filmmakers whose work you could call “psuedo-intellectual,” “self-indulgent,” and “mostly-plotless” in the midst of an almost unqualified rave, but I said many of the same things in my own review of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood almost two decades later. I guess you could say me and acclaimed director and television star Mark Duplass are a lot alike.
I’m glad Mark Duplass grew up to be an actor/writer/director and not a film critic like me. For his sake. I mean, not everyone’s cut out for this kind of work. It’s a rough pony, this gig, but someone’s gotta ride it, you know? It takes a pair of thick legs and an iron crotch to make it work. And besides, the last thing we need is another film critic. It’s bad enough with Pete Hammond eating the skins off the chicken at all our parties. Everyone hates that guy.