Blogger Syndrome - The Pressure to Review

When I started blogging about a year back I came across a relatively famous blogger (can't remember his blog name) who after about a month of me reading his posts declared that he was going to quit writing. The reason for this sudden decision was that he found himself not enjoying movies anymore. He claimed that in place of letting the film entertain him, he found his mind wandering off towards what to write in the review.

I too seem to be suffering from this case it seems. Lately, I have found my mind get distracted while watching a movie thinking what I would want to write in its review. I don't like this one bit. Just the other day, while watching True Romance for the very first time, I made a conscious decision that I would not write a review of the movie. To my surprise I enjoyed the movie a whole lot more because it had my 100% attention throughout its course.

I know some of you are seasoned bloggers who watch movies on a daily basis as well as publish reviews everyday. My question to you is if you too suffer from the same problem which i've termed as the "Blogger Syndrome"? Do you feel that as a result of the pressure to review a movie, be it for a personal blog or professionally, more time is spent fixating on the positives and negatives of the movie rather than its total enjoyment? In fact, in-between I even started taking my iPad to take notes while watching a movie in my home theater, a practice that I did not continue after a couple of movies.

In a perfect world, I would love to disassociate myself from any thought during the movie and just think about it afterwards when I write about it, but unfortunately that has not been the case. I have tried not writing a review on my immediate return leaving it at times for weeks afterwards, but still I find myself forming sentences for my write-up mid-movies. Ideally, repeat watching would be a great solution to the problem. Enjoy the movie the first time round and then look at it critically the second time, but with the abundance of movies to still watch, repeat viewings are few and far between.

For now I haven't reached the stage where I would give up writing and that might disappoint some of you, but I have had a hard and long thought over it and if this does continue, I fear I might one day follow on the footsteps on my above mentioned fellow blogger.