How to enjoy movies more

polygon.com:

The rise of streaming services means there are more options than ever about which movies to watch and how to watch them. But those options have also left a lot of us jaded. It’s easy to feel so overwhelmed with choice that you end up watching movies out of a sense of obligation, whether that means doggedly trying to keep up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe or taking in all the awards-season conversation-starters. Or, maybe, wind up not watching anything at all. But when watching feels like homework, it’s easy to feel like any given movie that isn’t an absolute banger is wasting precious time you could have used on something else.

Plenty of us still love movies — love watching them, talking about them, reading about them, even collecting them. If you’ve felt disengaged or even bored with movies lately, perhaps plagued by the “hundreds of titles released every year, but there’s nothing good to watch” feeling, or if you find yourself second-screening just to stay engaged, you certainly aren’t alone. As someone who’s literally turned movie-watching into work, I fight the “movies are homework” feeling as much as anyone else. Here are some solutions that helped me enjoy movies more, and that might work for you.

Flopping down on the couch and flipping through streaming service launch pages is a recipe for boredom. “I don’t know what I want, streaming service, figure it out for me” is a high barrier for any movie or recommendation algorithm to overcome. Instead, decide what you want to watch before you turn on the TV, like you’re headed to a movie theater. Actively looking forward to watching a specific film puts you in a better, more curious, more engaged mindset before you’ve even started.

How do you pick one movie when there’s so much out there? First off, keep your own running “films to watch” list — when you see a trailer, hear a recommendation, or catch a reference to something that sounds like your kind of thing, jot it down somewhere accessible, like a memo app in