Culture Crash: Passing the Time During This Period of ‘Social Distancing’

Life in the time of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic has meant encouraging people to stay home – it has meant working from home, eating at home, and, yes, watching movies and TV at home.

Luckily, the movie selections on Netflix right now are very strong.

For example, Netflix is currently streaming Steve Jobs, the 2015 film written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle. Steve Jobs is less of a biopic because it has a much more interesting structure than the typical rags-to-riches biopic structure we’re all so familiar with. Instead, the film covers just 14 years in the life of the tech icon by way of 3 acts, each years apart. The movie checks in on Jobs in 1984, when he is launching the Macintosh 128k, in 1988, after Jobs was ousted from Apple and when he was launching the NeXT Computer, and in 1998, when he is launching the iMac. While Sorkin’s other movie about a famed computer entrepreneur, The Social Network, gets all the love, Steve Jobs is truly fantastic as well.

Netflix is also streaming The Shawshank Redemption, widely considered one of the greatest films of all time. The movie is a must-see if you’ve never seen it, and one of the most enjoyable re-watches to ever be made for those of us who have already seen it once or 10 times.

Two of Christopher Nolan’s masterpieces, Inception and The Dark Knight are also available to stream on Netflix, as well as David Fincher’s dark, gritty, wonderful true-crime epic, Zodiac.

Finally, if you never got around to watching The Irishman during award’s season, there has never been a better time to spend 3 and a half hours watching the latest from Martin Scorsese. You can even keep the Scorsese and De Niro love going by following The Irishman up with Goodfellas and Raging Bull, both of which are also currently streaming on Netflix.

So.. stay indoors, wash your hands and enjoy some movies.

I’m Evan Rook.

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