Wildlife Is Love

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I triple pup dare you to look at that goddamned gif and not grin -- in other Wonderful Jake Gyllenhaal news today is the day that Criterion is dropping their Wildlife disc! It was supposed to be last week but as we told you got a teensy bit delayed, as went the world. If you're somehow unaware what the hell Wildlife is well really you should just listen to me right now, go buy the disc, wait for it to come to your house, and watch the damn thing. I'll wait. 

Okay it's two weeks later -- you're back? I'll go on. As you have just seen Wildlife is Paul Dano's film starring Carey Mulligan and Jake here as young parents (their son is played by the astonishing newcomer Ed Oxenbould) going through a smash-up -- Oxenbould is great, Jake is great, but it's really Mulligan's show and she turns in maybe her greatest performance to date and with a career and a talent like hers that's saying something. I saw the film a couple of times in theaters and its effect turned out to be cumulative -- the more I watched the film the more hysterically sad I was by its end. That last shot (the one on the poster) is devastating.

(Here is my first review.) Am I biased because I am A Child Of Divorce? Probably! But god this film rings true, profoundly true. The more time passes the more convinced I am I should've ranked it even higher than #9 on my list of favorite 2018 movies -- 2018 was a stupendously good year in retrospect though, wasn't it? We didn't know what we had when we had it, and by "it" I mean "movies." I MISS MOVIES. Sigh. Lemme look at that gif of Jake with a puppy again, I'll be fine.