The at-home cinephile experience: Pandemic has made watching good cinema difficult but not impossible

We’ve all had to endure our own personal challenges over these past few months, as well as myriad of other difficulties that life decided to throw at us in 2020. But one of the invisible challenges that came to so many people I know is the lack of a movie theater and the loss of the cinematic experience.

Not being able to go to the movies or enjoy an art form that was so readily available and accessible accurately encapsulates the chaos and disappointment that this pandemic brought on a personal level.

We all have something that we feel we’re missing because of the pandemic, whether that is live music, sports or traveling the globe. For me and many other cinephiles, that great disappointment comes from losing the movie-going journey.

But if there’s one thing we learned during the pandemic, it was to adapt and overcome. In fact, the pandemic gave me the excuse to watch even more than I normally would. That is one of the wonderful things about being a cinephile – there is always some movie out there that you’ve never watched, and even the oldest films in existence could be brand new to you.

Something I quickly learned during the pandemic was that it was an excellent time to catch up on my large backlog of movies and TV shows. My show of choice for this was “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” a polished, passionate show with a deep storyline filled with complicated characters that all paints a new picture of the classic “Star Trek” we all know and love.

At 176 episodes, “DS9” is a show about being on the front lines of many separate conflicts and characters like Capt. Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) having to make moral and ethical choices with no easy answers while still maintaining the best qualities of humanity, like good men having to commit crimes to save billions of lives.

It is a challenge of the “Star Trek” ideals by showing that the perfect utopia it believes in has many more shades of gray than we were led to believe while still being about the human condition. As a refreshing taste of the kindness and decency in humanity, “DS9” helped me get through the pandemic intact.

But one of the wonderful things for cinephiles in the pandemic was that they continued to release new movies to streaming services. Having seen enough of these streaming releases, I can say that there have been some standouts.

The first standout of 2020 is Leigh Whannell’s “The Invisible Man,” one of the better thrillers in recent memory. While released in February, just before the pandemic began, this one still haunts me with how it can turn an empty hallway or a single footprint into a tense situation.

The film’s use of negative space complements the paranoia of Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) fearing for her life from someone who knows everything about her, but she cannot see.

But the best film of 2020 thus far has to be Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods,” a poignant, profound look at the soul of the African American community.

In the hands of another filmmaker, this would be a strange melding of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and John Huston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” about how greed and gold corrupts the souls of good men, while examining the descent into madness that many men in the Vietnam War went through.

But then you add in Lee’s boisterous anger and fear that he feels for all of the Black community that he has sharpened here into a fine spear that cuts deeply at the problems that face our nation. Lee’s voice adds volumes to these men divided by their ambitions and worries, making their journey through the Vietnam jungles feel much more personal.

And you begin to realize that Lee’s anger is justified. This is highlighted by Delroy Lindo’s manic but heartfelt performance in the lead, capturing the confusion and outrage of a man the world has forgotten. Lindo is deserving of the Oscar next year (whenever that ends up happening), regardless of his competition.

Works of art that use the full range of human emotions as their paint make movies like “Da 5 Bloods” and shows like “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” so worthwhile. They are reminders that, even when this pandemic is over, visual storytelling is unrivaled.

There might come a day when movie theaters go extinct, but as long as there’s a filmmaker who has something important to say or wants to show us a new world we never imagined, there will always be a theater to show that filmmaker’s dream the way they want it to be seen.