Streaming My Way Through a Pandemic
By Bob Gaydos
George Clooney and Brad Pitt, streaming in one of the “Ocean’s” movies.
Apropos of nothing, the list below represents a significant portion of my at-home viewing entertainment in 2020, the year of the pandemic. If it’s representative of anything, it’s what I did when I wasn’t writing about you know who.
I don’t see any pattern in the list, except maybe that George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Paul Newman, Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington all appear more than once. What the offerings all have in common is that they were not on television. All were streamed, thanks to Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube and Disney Plus. If the stock market is reflective of anything, it appears a lot of other folks were passing the time streaming 2020 as well.
Everything on the list is a movie, not a series. (I’m counting “Mangrove” as a stand-alone.) There were a few of those, too, as well as varied educational offerings, which I have been told will help to keep my mind razor sharp.
But these are all one-shot features, some old, some new. I’m not critiquing any, but I do welcome any comments or questions you may have on the list as well as recommendations for 2021. I’m serious. I found this to be one of the few things that people could talk about last year without arguing and that I could write about without using the word, “Dotard.” …
Darn. Habit. Happy New Year and happy streaming.
The List:
The Laundromat
The Pianist
The Commuter
Book Club
Julie/Julia
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Philadelphia
The Danish Girl
The Peacemaker
The Coldest Game
Ladies in Lavender
A Serious Man
An Inspector Calls
The Rainmaker
Where the Money Is
Hail, Caesar!
The Double
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Battered Bastards of Baseball
Nobody’s Fool
Quartet
Minority Report
Rocket Man
To Catch a Thief
The Gardener
Ocean’s Twelve
Ocean’s Thirteen
The Social Dilemma
Secret in Their Eyes
Cafe Society
The Departed
Halston
My Octopus Teacher
Hank
Man of the Year
Mangrove
The Dressmaker
Cookie’s Fortune
Greyhound
Margot Fonteyn
Uncle Frank
Bombshell
Deja Vu
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Bikram
Diana: The Royal Truth
Pippin
Amazon Empire
rjgaydos@gmail.com
Bob Gaydos is writer-in-residence at zestoforange.com.
Tags: 2020, Amazon, Bob Gaydos, Denzel, George Clooney, movies, Netflix, pandemic, streaming, Tom Hanks, YouTube
